The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space

The Organizational Complex

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Reinhold Martin

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Architecture,Media,and Corporate Space

The Organizational Complex

The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

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© 2003 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Myriad by Graphic Composition, Inc., and was printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Martin, Reinhold, 1964– The organizational complex : architecture, media, and corporate space / Reinhold Martin. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-262-13426-8 (alk. paper) 1. Architecture and society—United States— History—20th century. 2. Commercial buildings— United States. 3. Commercial buildings— Communication systems. 4. Corporate image— United States. I. Title. NA2543.S6 M36 2003 725'.2'097309045—dc21 2002035585

For my parents

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Contents

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List of Illustrations viii Acknowledgments xviii

Introduction

2

1

The Organizational Complex

2

Pattern-Seeing

3

The Physiognomy of the Office

4

Organic Style

5

Computer Architectures

6

The Topologies of Knowledge

42 80

122

Epilogue: Hallucinations Notes 232 Illustration Credits Index 290

14

288

156

212

182

Illustrations

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1.1

29 Wiener, Deutsch, and de Santillana, “How U.S. Cities Can Prepare for Atomic War” (1950)

1.2

29 Wiener, Deutsch, and de Santillana, life belts (1950)

1.3

30 Wiener, Deutsch, and de Santillana, existing urban hubs (1950)

1.4

30 Wiener, Deutsch, and de Santillana, typical city (1950)

1.5

30 Wiener, Deutsch, and de Santillana, proposed city (1950)

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1.6

31 Lapp, City “X” diagram (1948)

1.7

32 Lapp, New York City diagram (1949)

1.8

33 Lapp, “rodlike,” “doughnut,” and “satellite” cities (1949)

1.9

34 Hilberseimer, radius of hydrogen bomb blast (1955)

1.10

39 Illustrations for Wiener’s “Pure Patterns in a Natural World” (1956)

1.11

41 Cover, AT&T annual report (1958)

2.1

44 Growth pattern of silicon carbide crystals (1956)

2.2

47 Photograph of a head louse (1925)

2.3

49 Moholy-Nagy, Dynamic of the Metropolis (1922), X-ray photograph of a dead chicken

2.4

50 Kamman, photomontage (ca. 1929)

2.5

56 Koppe, “virtual volume” (ca. 1938)

2.6

56 Moholy-Nagy, Space Modulator and its “virtual volume” (1940)

2.7

60 Kepes, snake on patterned background (1944)

2.8

60 Kepes, “spatial tension” and “dynamic equilibrium” (1944)

2.9

64 Kepes, advertisement for the Container Corporation of America (1938)

2.10

68 Kepes, The New Landscape exhibition (1951)

2.11

69 Edgerton, Golfer Multiflash (n.d.)

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Illustrations

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2.12

69 Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier, photograph of hydrogen bomb explosion (1952)

2.13

71 Matter, cover of Arts and Architecture (1946)

2.14

73 Snail’s tongue (1956)

2.15

74 Cathode-ray oscilloscope patterns (1956)

2.16

75 Radiographs: ant, zinc in tomato fruit, grasshopper spermatocyte, crab nebulae (1956)

2.17

76 Haffenrichter, drawing of polystyrola, and Fuller, “Model Discontinuous Compression Structuring” (1956)

2.18

77 Digital Computer Laboratory, MIT, magnetic core memory; Charles and Ray Eames, standard chair components; experimental ceiling lighting; student project, modular paper construction; Pelzer, acoustic ceiling (project) (1956)

3.1

83 Kahn & Jacobs, 425 Park Avenue, New York; Emery Roth & Sons, Colgate Palmolive Building, New York (1957)

3.2

86 Eliel Saarinen, Chicago Tribune tower competition entry (1922)

3.3

86 Associated Architects, Rockefeller Center, New York (1928–1940)

3.4

89 Associated Architects, typical floor plan, RCA Building, New York (1933)

3.5

93 Roethlisberger, “Diagram Showing the Interaction of Various Related Fields” (1954)

3.6

94 Typical office plans, RCA Building (1933)

3.7

94 Typical “T” office plan (1945)

Illustrations

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3.8

96 Harrison & Abramowitz et al., United Nations Secretariat, New York (1948–1952)

3.9

97 Harrison & Abramowitz et al., United Nations Secretariat, office interior

3.10

97 Emery Roth & Sons, various office buildings, New York (1950s)

3.11

99 Curtain wall classifications (1955)

3.12

100 Curtain wall classifications (1957)

3.13

101 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Lever House, New York (1952)

3.14

104 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Inland Steel headquarters, Chicago (1958)

3.15

104 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Inland Steel headquarters, plan (1958)

3.16

106 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, “Flexible Space” (1942)

3.17

107 Eero Saarinen and Lundquist, winning entry, “Designs for Postwar Living” (1943)

3.18

108 Pei and Duhart, second-place entry, “Designs for Postwar Living” (1943)

3.19

109 Models and diagrams of domestic activity (1944)

3.20

110 Eames, Entenza, and Matter, “The Family” (1944)

3.21

112 Matter, Man Dressing (n.d.)

3.22

113 Eero Saarinen and Lundquist, “Dressing Radius” (1943)

3.23

113 Saarinen, “Demountable Space” (1942)

3.24

115 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Chase Manhattan Bank headquarters, New York (1961)

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Illustrations

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3.25

116 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Chase Manhattan Bank headquarters, plan (1961)

3.26

117 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Union Carbide Building, New York (1960)

3.27

118 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Union Carbide Building, curtain wall (1960)

3.28

119 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Union Carbide Building, office interiors (1960)

3.29

119 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Union Carbide Building, lobby (1960)

3.30

119 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Union Carbide Building, office interiors (1960)

4.1

124 General Motors Technical Center through windshield (1959)

4.2

126 Eero Saarinen, General Motors Technical Center,Warren, Michigan (1945–1956)

4.3

129 Kahn and Geddes, General Motors Pavilion, 1939–1940 World’s Fair, New York

4.4

130 Geddes, “Futurama,” 1939–1940 World’s Fair, New York

4.5

131 Thompson, morphological adaptations (1917)

4.6

131 Geddes, “Diagram Illustrating the Principle of Streamlining” (1932)

4.7

132 Styling:The Look of Things, cover and page (1955)

4.8

133 Styling:The Look of Things, excerpts (1955)

4.9

134 Loewy, “Evolution Chart for Automobiles” (1933)

Illustrations

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4.10

142 Eliel Saarinen, original scheme of General Motors Technical Center, Warren, Michigan (1945)

4.11

144 Eero Saarinen and Eliel Saarinen, intermediate scheme of General Motors Technical Center (1949)

4.12

144 Saarinen and Saarinen, intermediate scheme of General Motors Technical Center, site plan (1949)

4.13

145 Eero Saarinen, final scheme of General Motors Technical Center, site plan (1956)

4.14

146 Eero Saarinen, engineering group, General Motors Technical Center, administration wing (1951)

4.15

146 Saarinen, engineering group, General Motors Technical Center, plan (1951)

4.16

146 Saarinen, engineering group, General Motors Technical Center, sectional perspective (1951)

4.17

147 Saarinen, engineering group, General Motors Technical Center, office interior (1951)

4.18

147 Saarinen, engineering group, General Motors Technical Center, curtain wall (1951)

4.19

147 Saarinen, with Smith, Hinchman & Grylls, General Motors Technical Center, luminous modular ceiling (1956)

4.20

149 Saarinen, research group, General Motors Technical Center (1953)

4.21

149 Saarinen, process development group, General Motors Technical Center (ca. 1954)

4.22

150 Saarinen, styling group, General Motors Technical Center (1956)

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4.23

152 Saarinen, research group, General Motors Technical Center, stair (1953)

4.24

153 Saarinen, General Motors Technical Center (1956)

4.25

154 Saarinen, styling dome, General Motors Technical Center (1956)

4.26

154 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, United States Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs (1958)

5.1

158 Oscilloscope pattern of an analog computer (1956)

5.2

158 Cathode-ray oscilloscope display of a problem being solved by a digital computer (1956)

5.3

160 “A person’s first ‘IBM’ record” (1955)

5.4

161 Eero Saarinen, IBM manufacturing and training facility, Rochester, Minnesota (1958)

5.5

162 Saarinen, IBM manufacturing and training facility, curtain wall (1958)

5.6

163 Saarinen, IBM manufacturing and training facility, curtain wall details (1958)

5.7

164 Saarinen, IBM manufacturing and training facility (1958)

5.8

165 Thomas J. Watson Sr. (late 1940s)

5.9

165 IBM organization chart (1957)

5.10

167 Rand, two versions of IBM logotype (1956)

5.11

170 Bolles, IBM manufacturing and research facility, San Jose (1958)

5.12

171 Noyes with Sundberg-Ferar, IBM Random Access Memory Accounting Machine (1956)

Illustrations

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5.13

173 Noyes, redesigned IBM New York showroom (1955)

5.14

176 IBM System/360 (ca. 1964)

5.15

179 IBM System/360 Model 85 configuration (ca. 1968)

5.16

180 Eero Saarinen, IBM manufacturing and training facility, Rochester, Minnesota, site plan (1958)

5.17

180 Saarinen, IBM manufacturing and training facility, plan (1958)

6.1

188 Press conference announcing the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) air-defense system (1956)

6.2

188 Fuller, geodesic radome installed at the Defense Early Warning line

6.3

189 Data flows in SAGE

6.4

189 SAGE human-machine interface (ca. 1960)

6.5

191 Eero Saarinen, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Laboratory,Yorktown Heights, New York, early site plan (1957)

6.6

194 Saarinen & Associates, comparison of the site plans of an early scheme for the Bell Telephone Laboratories at Holmdel, New Jersey, and the Bell Laboratories campus at Murray Hill, New Jersey (1957)

6.7

195 Voorhees,Walker, Foley & Smith, Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill (1941)

6.8

195 Voorhees,Walker, Foley & Smith, Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, laboratory module (1941)

6.9

196 Saarinen, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Laboratory, site plan (1961)

6.10

198 Saarinen & Associates, study sketches for the Bell Telephone Laboratories, Holmdel (ca. 1957)

xv

Illustrations

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6.11

199 Eero Saarinen, Bell Telephone Laboratories, Holmdel, plan (1962, 1966)

6.12

200 Saarinen, Bell Telephone Laboratories, Holmdel, atrium (1962, 1966)

6.13

201 Saarinen & Associates, early scheme for IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Laboratory,Yorktown Heights (1957)

6.14

202 Saarinen, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Laboratory, plans (1961)

6.15

203 Saarinen, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Laboratory, planning modules (1961)

6.16

203 Saarinen, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Laboratory, front (1961)

6.17

204 Saarinen, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Laboratory, storage wall (1961)

6.18

205 Saarinen, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Laboratory, corridor (1961)

6.19

208 Saarinen, Bell Telephone Laboratories, Holmdel, interiors (1962, 1966)

6.20

208 Saarinen, Bell Telephone Laboratories, Holmdel, site plan (1962, 1966)

6.21

209 Saarinen, Bell Telephone Laboratories, Holmdel, curtain wall (1962, 1966)

6.22

210 Title page of feature article on Saarinen’s Bell Telephone Laboratories, Holmdel (1967)

7.1

220 Bladen, untitled (1965)

7.2

224 Eero Saarinen, John Deere and Company headquarters, Moline, Illinois, interiors (1964)

7.3

224 Saarinen, John Deere and Company headquarters, desks (1964)

Illustrations

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7.4

225 Saarinen, CBS headquarters, New York (1964)

7.5

226 Saarinen, study sketch for CBS headquarters, New York (1960)

7.6

226 Knoll and Saarinen & Associates, CBS headquarters, New York, interiors (1964)

7.7

227 Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey, monolith (1968)

7.8

229 Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey, “stargate” (1968)

xvii

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

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This book is a product of discourse. As such, it owes an enormous debt to those with whom I have had the opportunity to discuss its content as it has developed, beginning with its first incarnation as a dissertation at the School of Architecture at Princeton University. At Princeton and thereafter I have had the benefit of readings, criticism, conversation, and insight from Georges Teyssot, Beatriz Colomina, Alan Colquhoun, Robert Gutman, Alessandra Ponte, Anson Rabinbach, and Mark Wigley, all of whom have my most sincere gratitude. I am also most grateful to Kenneth Frampton, Mary McLeod, Anthony Vidler, and Gwendolyn Wright for their readings and advice on the text. Peter Papademetriou has likewise been of great assistance with the Saarinen material in particular. Any lingering errors, omissions, or other indiscretions are purely my own.

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In addition, I am indebted to my colleagues at Grey Room, Branden Joseph and Felicity Scott, who have offered an intellectual context that has been central in developing many of the ideas in this book. Many others have also provided friendship, insight, and support along the way: Mark Cousins, Laurie Hawkinson, Tom Keenan, Laura Kurgan, Duncan McCorquodale, Detlef Mertins, the late Ernest Pascucci, and Henry Urbach. At the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University, I am grateful to Dean Bernard Tschumi for his generous support for this project. I have also benefited immensely from the input of many students who have participated in seminars based on this research at Columbia, and earlier at the School of Architecture at Yale University. The late Gyorgy Kepes, Juliet Kepes, Julie Kepes Stone, Jim La Due, Kevin Roche, and Phil Summers were all kind enough to share with me their thoughts and experiences regarding this material. Chris Barker has been heroic in his assistance with image research. Numerous individuals at the various institutions at which this research has been carried out have also been most helpful. I am grateful to Roger Conover of the MIT Press for his interest in and support for this project, to Matthew Abbate for his guidance, to Alice Falk for her precision and thoughtfulness in editing the manuscript, and to Emily Gutheinz for her elegant design. While I was at Princeton, a portion of this research was carried out with the support of the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation. The publication itself has been supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Earlier versions of two chapters have appeared elsewhere: chapter 1 as “The Organizational Complex: Cybernetics, Space, Discourse,” in Assemblage, no. 37 (1998), and chapter 5 as “Computer Architectures: Saarinen’s Patterns, IBM’s Brains” in Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Réjean Legault, eds., Anxious Modernisms: Experiments in Postwar Architectural Culture (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000). This work is dedicated to my parents, Josephine Martin and Reinhold Martin. And my last thanks are reserved for Kadambari Baxi, who has been my companion on this space odyssey from the beginning, and to whose “new vision” I owe more than I can say. New York, August 2002

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The Organizational Complex

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Introduction

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If there is something comforting—religious, if you want—about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

We’re told businesses have souls, which is surely the most terrifying news in the world. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies”

What follows is a map, intended as a guide to thinking differently about the corporate architecture that rose in the United States in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. This map cannot be taken up as though the historical space it describes is now visible in its totality. Nor does it provide access to some mythic uncharted territory waiting to be absorbed into the academic or professional canon. Nor, finally, should the reader assume that its primary referent, the architecture of the corporations, is or ever was simply transparent to the imperatives of capital—or indeed, of remote corporate power. Instead, this map charts architecture’s immanence within a network of networks that I am calling an “organizational complex.” The organizational complex can be described as the aesthetic and technological extension of what has been known since the early 1960s as the “military-industrial

3

Introduction

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complex.” Its defining epistemologies coalesce into an organicism that operates on the model of a total, if pliant, system. Within this system architecture acts as a conduit for organizational patterns passing through the networks of communication that constitute the system’s infrastructure. The system’s phantasmagorias—with built architecture also counted prominently among these—likewise constitute an indelibly real system of images, with indelibly real consequences. Far from simply staging a spectacle that screens out the structural logic of corporate power by coaxing the spectator-user into a state of passive distraction, architecture works here actively to integrate spaces and subjects into naturalized organizations, specifically to the degree that it is “reduced” to corporate image. In excerpting case studies for analysis, I have concentrated on corporate architecture in the United States, in the technological, aesthetic, and social context of the late 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s. Although this focus may appear to limit the conclusions that can be drawn here with regard to the postwar trajectory of modern architecture in general, it marks a specific site that, during the period of McCarthyism and the cold war, must always be understood implicitly to harbor its geopolitical exterior. The architectural developments examined should likewise be seen against the implicit backdrop of a multifarious international modernism that often took contradictory forms during the immediate postwar period. This was a period of accelerated commercialization, of decolonization, and—in the context of advanced aesthetic practice and thought—of considered reassessment of the effects and legacies of the modernist avant-gardes. It was also a period when, owing in large part (but not exclusively) to wartime techno-scientific developments, the fabric of modernity itself underwent substantial transformation. Thus, while the corporate architecture of the postwar United States may appear at first to mark the apotheosis of the alienated, modernized “mass,” in its historical specificity it extends a new and different vector. Not simply the vector of standardization or of the assembly line as projected in the seriality of the ubiquitous metal-andglass curtain wall, this was the historical vector that redirected such processes and their artifacts toward a reconditioning of the modern subject. Such a tendency was already visible in the United States by the early 1930s, in a fusion of aesthetic and technological practices that presented commodities such as automobiles as an everevolving system of choices addressed to the perceived individuality of the new subject, who was understood fundamentally as a consumer. The construction of an individualized consumer was, in that sense, a technocratic response to the alienating effects of the encroaching “mass ornament” so vividly described by Siegfried Kracauer in the late 1920s in Europe.1 This new subject effectively regained an organic connection to the functional whole of society by virtue of his or her own “individual” choices,

Introduction

4

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made within a system that was designed to offer variety by providing interchangeable elements in standardized formats. Architects would call these elements modules. In certain exemplary office buildings of the 1950s, earlier modernist experiments with spatial flexibility through modular assembly were exhaustively reworked and redeployed. The universal space associated with the steel frame and the planning grid was assimilated into a finely modulated field. This modularity, and the flexibility that it implied, became the very image—and the instrument—of the organizational complex. A comparable module likewise appeared in the social life of the postwar corporations, in the form of the figure designated by William H. Whyte as the “organization man.” As a cultural stereotype, this figure was hopelessly and even comically conformist. But as an instrument of that complex (which uses images such as stereotypes as if they were machines), the organization man brought together the twin imperatives of variety and standardization in a newfound humanity. No alienated cog in an indifferent mechanism, the organization man identified with the corporation as though it were his family. The corporate doctrine of “human relations” encouraged this identification under the thesis that it would increase productivity. But Whyte, like many other critics of corporate culture then and now, failed to recognize that such conformism did not merely overrun a more thoroughgoing individuality, thought to insulate the consumer from metropolitan anomie. Rather, like capitalism in general, it broke down the modern subject from within by encouraging consumerist differentiation as itself a norm, thus dividing the individual into an ever-finer set of indefinitely variable (yet enumerable) regulating codes that Gilles Deleuze was to identify, in the early 1990s, as constitutive of an emergent “control society.”2 In exploring architecture’s imbrication within such processes, I have sought out the proximity of what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno have called the “culture industry” to Deleuze’s control society, while suspending the dialectical role played by the reflective interiority of the Enlightenment subject in Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis.3 If there is an apparent contradiction here, it is that such an interiority functions for them as the pivot point for a negative dialectics that prevents their account from collapsing into the totalizing perspective they attribute to the culture industry itself. For Deleuze, in contrast, following to a large extent Michel Foucault, the control society emerges out of an epistemological rupture that transforms the very terms on which discourse, including critical discourse, is organized. Thus the inside-outside relation of reflective subject to society is itself reformulated. I retain such a reformulation as central to my hypothesis, in order to test architecture against it and vice versa. Absent dialectical negation, however, this approach may seem to attribute an a priori seamlessness to the organizational complex that cannot help but be confirmed in the details of the analysis. My characterization of architecture as one among many media might seem to secure such a reading, since it positions architecture firmly

5

Introduction

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within the culture industry without offering any leverage for resistance, thus potentially reinforcing the very forces it sets out to challenge. Indeed, communications media play a central role in the epistemological modulation I am exploring here. And perhaps no single building has served more effectively as a totem for thinking about the relation of architecture and mass media in the context of the North American culture industry than Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building, completed in 1957. Its supposed “silence”—in the face of what Kracauer once called the “pictorial deluge” of mass communications—has, in one eloquent analysis, granted this object the privileged status of a mute witness withdrawing in dignified horror from the debased urban scene of New York’s new commercial center, Park Avenue.4 Or, more dialectically still, Seagram has been characterized as a “handmade readymade,” confronting architecture-as-mass-reproducible-commodity (in the form of the curtain wall) with the provisional, waning aura of the singular artwork, in an indeterminate oscillation.5 But such readings, while making effective use of the critical tools supplied by the Frankfurt School and by Adorno in particular, are prevented by their dialectical commitments from engaging the historical transformation of the subject as anything other than a loss. For is it not the case that Seagram’s own reproducibility, both in the form of the much-lamented “copies” that rapidly infiltrated the New York skyline and in the form of the many “lesser” curtain-walled variations in Mies’s own work, marks even that building as a mere module, a unit of exchange passing through invisible circuits while providing a silent circuitry of its own? And is it not perhaps the case that the building thereby bears paradoxical witness not so much to the withering away of the aura as to the collapse of the architectural object into a field of modulated patterns visible at every scale, from the urban to the interior? Is it not possible, then, that the apparent seamlessness of the culture industry figured in these patterns may be confronted critically not with profound silences, but with the noise in its own channels? That is: Can we not imagine an architectural analysis in which repetition replaces opposition as a critical tool, relentlessly articulating the circuitries of control implied by the modular, patterned cascade, as well as the networks of power and knowledge that make it possible? And might not such an analysis also provide access to the holes embedded within those networks, holes that were and are the modern media, including buildings like Seagram? A response to such questions requires attention to media specificities. And like network television—its historical contemporary—the architecture of the curtain wall is a medium to be watched in passing rather than looked at like an artwork.6 That is, it channels flows, patterns of patterns. Hence, in treating Seagram (in passing) as only one among many curtain-walled office buildings of the period rather than as a singular exception, I have attempted to watch the curtain wall as it switches architectural channels, from one corporation to another, one city to another, one module to

Introduction

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another. This is the logic of organization. Where the skyscraper monuments of the postwar period may appear to assimilate corporate authority into the symbolic locus of the church and the state (and the mythic power these embody), in actuality these buildings harbor a new, horizontal network of open circuits to which Mies was relatively indifferent. This network reaches outside the city and ultimately across the globe, proliferating in lines of transportation and communication that also constitute the space of a new symbolic. Still, even today these buildings are often treated as though they were and remain brute, mechanical force incarnate, rather than what they are: empty skins full of individualized consumer-subjects that, like giant television sets, organize through the agency of an auratic delirium. Revisionist debates concerning their preservation (and secure entombment), as well as quaint vanguardist maneuvers designed to overcome their apparently authoritarian rigidity (the formalist critique of the modernist “box”), converge on the assumption that these buildings mark the culmination—the end— of something. But these buildings are not merely the tombstones of the modern avant-gardes. Like the ubiquitous monoliths of the 1960s—the primary objects of minimal art, the black boxes of communications theory, the black space-slab of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the World Trade Center—they are ciphers in which past and future are scrambled into a continuous, modulated hum: an endless feedback loop. These fragments of circuitry, these weightless patterns, these shadows, are ghosts that cannot and must not be chased away. I have therefore attempted in successive chapters to summon up certain of these ghosts, beginning with that of the organizational complex itself as seen through the medium of an emergent cybernetics and, in particular, through the application of redundant feedback loops to an urban context in which the city was understood as a primary cold war target. In this cybernetic sense, decentralization, or the dispersal of urban infrastructures into an increasingly horizontal network of communication and transportation lines, was an instrument not merely of civil defense against an external enemy but of defense against an internal one: the disorder that was anticipated with the demise of centralized governmental and civic authority in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear strike. And so technocratic and aesthetic research accelerated in the direction of ever more efficient mechanisms of self-regulation, self-organization. These in turn helped invent new kinds of cities, new kinds of architectures, and with them a new “self,” none of which could be said to possess the traditional spatial properties that divided inside from outside in any meaningful sense. This dissolution of the inside via its potentially infinite, external replication is also indicative of a historical transformation affecting the nature of networks in general as spatial, technological, and social instruments. Within the organizational complex itself, such a transformation was already characterized typologically and chronologically

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by the early 1960s, with “centralized” systems seen as manifesting rigorous hierarchies, newer “decentralized” systems regulated through local, more dispersed centers, and emergent “distributed” systems fully self-regulating and without hierarchy or center in any sense.7 Though these network types represent idealized and rather formalistic models, they are useful diagrams that describe potentially distinct configurations of power and knowledge. Within the organizational complex, for example, decentralization is pursued (and realized) at a variety of levels, even as corporate hegemony is consolidated in what was called at the time a “power elite.” But this consolidation actually serves a pervasive systematicity whose ultimate horizon is the capillary distribution of power into microphysical protocols. Such a high degree of personalization is among the distinguishing characteristics of Deleuze’s “control society,” in which even businesses are said to have “souls.” At the source of this reenchantment is an organicism that I am therefore describing as “organizational.” Networked, systems-based, feedback-driven—this organicism, and the circuits of power that it serves, sustains myths of dynamic deregulation, corporate benevolence, and dispersed, de-hierarchized interactivity. In architecture, it must be distinguished from the organicist premises of any number of earlier modernisms, including Mies’s “skin and bones” transparencies and Le Corbusier’s cellular preoccupations, all of which nevertheless constitute a matrix out of which the new formation emerged.8 Thus, the historical discontinuity marked by the development of a systems-based notion of organization in architecture takes the form of a manifest continuity with specific modernist practices that preceded it. The grandiosity of this disturbance in the epistemic field is measured by the fact that that it occurred quietly, surreptitiously. Earth-shattering yet nearly invisible, it was the result of a covert operation carried out under the rubric of “modernism,” with even its agents and its managers caught unawares. Though at certain moments it may even seem that the terms architecture and organization have been converted into synonyms here, their meanings are not identical. They are to be understood, rather, as partial and uneven functions of one another. As it becomes one among many media, architecture also becomes one among many technologies of organization. Organization, on the other hand, is not merely the inverse, some root function of architecture, or a sophisticated means of carrying out architecture’s age-old assignment of imposing order. Organization belongs, in this instance, to the project of naturalization as carried out through the medium of architecture. As the theoretical basis for understanding the formation of organisms since the nineteenth century, organization has been called up repeatedly as compensation for the loss of nature and the crisis of mimetic representation that occurred at the onset of modernity. In the context I examine here, organization thus becomes the basis for the production of a new, architectural and technological nature that, after the

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war, promises not a return to the mythic Gemeinschaft (or organic community) of premetropolitan subjectivity but an advance into a new kind of organic integration, of which we likely have yet to experience the final chapter. Articulating such a shift in epistemological terms exemplified by cybernetics, I pursue the emergence of the new organizational model in case studies passing through a variety of channels. These include passages through the writings of the visual theorist Gyorgy Kepes that track the translation of Bauhaus principles into the cybernetic milieu; through the curtain wall and its internal histories; and through a series of corporate works by Eero Saarinen, the architect who, along with his contemporary Gordon Bunshaft, perhaps best understood the imperatives of business in relation to those of modern architecture. Though the works of such figures as Saarinen and Bunshaft have proven largely resistant to interpretation in canonical terms, it has been suggested often enough and in various ways that the modernisms they practiced in the corporate context monumentalize the withering of the visionary ideals of the European avant-gardes into the cynical instrumentality of capital: from tragedy to farce.9 We will see, however, how certain avant-gardist gestures, built on a technological organicism from the start, are in fact realized—rather than betrayed—as modern architecture is brought into the service of the corporate mythos. At this level, the “glass architecture” of the postwar curtain wall has little in common with the vitreous utopian fantasies of the 1920s, despite genealogical ties that span the intervening decades. Glass architecture had from the start been a vessel for the organicist myth but, paradoxically, its realization in the curtain wall also transformed it beyond recognition, as it materialized a substantially different organicism—though an organicism nonetheless. In treating architecture as one among many media regulating the organizational nexus, I have also sought to account for its capacity to “build” corporate images. In each instance, these images certainly possess semantic content. However, as with the patterns punched into the cards that drove the so-called IBM machines, I have not characterized the messages they carry primarily in semantic terms, although the construction a new visual “language” was a key aspect of the organizational project. More significantly, these images constituted a kind of operating system designed to regulate the performance of the emergent human-machine assemblage. In their production, transmission, and reception as what the cyberneticist Norbert Wiener called “pure patterns in a natural world,” they were representations that declared victory over representation itself. That is, in the lexicon of cybernetics and information theory, they were informatic in that they were negentropic. They resisted disorder by transmitting abstract, organized patterns of visual data as input into a complex whose output would consist of more organized patterns of data. In turn, the human subject as

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constituted through these flows came to be understood as nothing more—or less— than an organized, informatic pattern. The entropic specter against which the organizational complex gathered its resources in defense of this subject appears most vividly in the atomic cloud, whose image was recorded in tests with the same photographic rigor that informed the most advanced speculation about architecture. Yet what was most threatening was not the flash of light or the rising of the great plume, but rather the interruption in the flow of data that it signaled. Similarly, architecture was not at all threatened by the fact that its surfaces had been reduced to thicknesses measured in fractions of an inch, as its affect approached the glare of the photographic plate or of the television screen. It was perfectly possible to conceive an organic architecture of images, or of organized patterns. What was intolerable was the emptiness of its surfaces, relentless patterns evacuated of any residual interiority that might have been previously accorded to architectural spaces and their inhabitants. These surfaces were the instruments of organization. But they were also the agents of entropy, since the corporate organicity they sought was to be obtained under the sign of an impossible transparency that, through one of the many topological inversions we will witness, converged onto an undifferentiated blankness. In positioning architecture within this field, I borrow the notion of a “discourse network” from Friedrich Kittler, who in turn borrows it from the paranoid musings of Senatspräsident Daniel Paul Schreber.10 My use of Kittler’s rich and complex concept is, however, decidedly literal. It is simply that architecture, including buildings, asserts its irreducibly discursive aspect as a node in a communications network within and between disciplines and regimes of knowledge and production. But architecture and architects can also lay claim to a specific function within this web, relating to the spatial articulation of the “network” as such. What is a network? What does it look like? These are the kinds of questions that many architects ask. And many were already asking them speculatively in their efforts to redirect modernism in those years. Such efforts are visible in, for example, the work of the Team X group—Jaap Bakema; Candilis, Josic, and Woods; Alison and Peter Smithson, and others. They are also to be found slightly later in the reinvention of the Bauhaus concept at Ulm under Max Bill and after him Tomás Maldonado, and in the technological speculations of Cedric Price and of the Archigram group, among others.11 But the architecture that will occupy our attention here is a network architecture that quite rigorously does not look like a network. In addition to taking up the corporate architecture of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, I have excerpted the case of Saarinen from within a vast array of works and practitioners since, in carrying out yet redirecting his father’s legacy, he elicits the apparent contradictions of the modern/antimodern currents that course through the twentieth century, spanning its wars

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and continuing to this day. But he also brings to the surface the half-conscious encounter between architecture and the corporate ethos that lies hidden in the work of others. Saarinen’s willingness to broker a merger between architectural experimentation and the imperatives of the military-industrial complex is most visible in a succession of projects that he undertook during the 1950s for those very corporations that have come to summarize the drift toward a postindustrial techno-economic milieu: General Motors, International Business Machines, Bell Telephone. These institutions and their histories will in turn be seen as inseparable from architectural analysis, not merely as context or client but rather as technical interface. In still another sense, this study begins and ends with the discourse of Gyorgy Kepes. Purveyor of a “language of vision” adequate to what he called a “new landscape” of scientific and aesthetic principles that he tirelessly inventoried, Kepes offers a lens through which architecture takes on a different aspect. The set of visual techniques he termed “pattern-seeing” enables us to recognize the curtain wall and its topological innovations as modulations of a continuous, dynamic field pulsing up and down in scale. It also enables us to see the utopianism of this vision, as well as its complicity with the scaleless, open circuitry of control. Kepes may have been aware of this complicity, but his irrepressible optimism, modern to the core, drove him away from its ultimate implications. I have therefore sought to inhabit his insight, if only to subject it to a reversal that cannot be seen as anything other than a betrayal. With Kepes, organicism is given new life, which is what compels me to revisit his work in the context of an enigmatically organicist architecture to which he made infrequent reference, and vice versa. And so we are given these two, Saarinen and Kepes (whose own biographies included only occasional encounters): not as mutual influences, or as representatives of a generalized Kunstwollen or Zeitgeist, but as vectors of communication. That is how discourse networks work. They transmit information, patterns that in turn give rise to more patterns. We must, with Kepes, learn to see these patterns, which also means learning to see them precisely where none, apparently, exist. The degree to which this map succeeds in inducing a certain vision can thus be taken as one measure of its value as an instrument with which the empirical realities to which it refers may be grasped with greater lucidity, their scope measured, their gaps identified, their overdeterminations exploited. Among other things, its objects and characters may be counted as late entries into the roster of pharmacological agents that organize Thomas Pynchon’s map, in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), of a universe parallel to that which I am exploring here. The difference—that in this case we are dealing with the world of historical facts rather than historically based fiction—is secondary. Such resources as Pynchon’s novel work to supplement and thereby mediate a naturalized historical vision. Here, I have attempted to telescope together the two states named and explored by Pynchon: paranoia and anti-paranoia, a situation in

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which everything is connected to everything, and yet within each connection there remains an unbridgeable, intolerable gap. The scope of the ensuing endgame—paranoid organicism on the one hand, entropic dissipation on the other—designates the ethico-political horizon of my project. Though I characterize the effects of this endgame in terms of the emergence of what might be called a “postindustrial” or even “posthuman” subject, a subject immersed in and constructed by data flows and patterns, I have also endeavored to displace any residual totalizations that remain detectable in such figurations. Indeed, an overdetermined quest for an integrated totality dedicated to the maintenance of “dynamic equilibrium” is discernible in each historical instance I examine. The restoration of an equilibrated, organized complexity, whether in terms of the perceptual field, the social system, a unified science, or even a unity of art and science, became the rallying cry of those most sensitive to techno-scientific interference in the processes of gestalt formation, or the processes of identification with perceived unities that assured the subject of its own coherence. Calls on the part of architects, designers, and their apologists for organic integration were thus evidence of a deep anxiety in the face of the formlessness, disintegration, and entropic overload that were the pathological constituents of an aesthetically and technologically produced normality. Finally, as I develop the claim that the midcentury rupture of the war and the conditions that underlay it left in their wake a new and qualitatively different aestheticotechnological formation, many relevant issues and counterexamples may appear unjustly ignored. I do not, for example, locate architecture in the context of ideological struggles per se. My focus instead is on the complex intertwinings of discourse—that is, on the intertwinings of words, images, and things. Nor do I take up explicitly the constructions of gender, class, or race within the enforced normalcy associated with the corporations. I thus risk encouraging the misunderstanding that the “organization man”—white, middle-class, male—is invoked here as an authoritative prototype. On the contrary, as a technologically mediated module circulating within the organizational complex, the organization man should be understood as one of many “cyborgs” (or cybernetic organisms) produced by postwar technocracy.12 And just as the actual, lived alienation of such figures prevents their full assimilation into the corporate whole, their very artificiality is a potential instrument for an emancipatory politics that resists naturalization and seeks out new collectivities ungrounded in organicist pieties. I note this here because my primary effort has been to show that architecture has never for one minute been exempted from the historical transformations that shaped the latter half of the twentieth century and continue to shape our present. That today this assertion cannot simply be dismissed as a mere truism is registered in the fact that the 1960s and early 1970s—the years during which the World Trade Center was being designed and built—saw the definitive withdrawal of the architectural

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avant-gardes in the United States and elsewhere from confrontation with the geopolitical actualities of their era, into pseudo-oppositions such as that of formal autonomy versus populist historicism. Significantly, these safe new homes in which so-called debates could continue unimpeded by historical disturbances were constructed against the background of the curtain wall and of corporate modernism in general.13 In turn, the set of architectural techniques developed during the postwar period to consolidate corporate imagery offered a technical basis—the manipulation of the “skin”—through which that imagery was reinvented in the name of “history” by the postmodernisms that followed. Similarly the architecture of the curtain wall and of patterned modularities haunts all debates in today’s digital age, which is to say today’s globalized age, an age that began in both senses in the wartime cauldron of technological innovation and market realignment. Half a century later, under the regime of a millennial “new economy,” the corporate pathos by then condensed into a paper-thin historicism was reborn in the new networks of finance capital in the form of a Silicon Valley-style futurism. Along the lost highways of the postindustrial landscape, the digital age has thus found its architectural expression as a routinized amalgam of historical pastiche and technological triumphalism. Such a triumphalism has been echoed in the academic design laboratories by a digital neo-avant-garde in an organicist repression of its own technologically accelerated entropy. This avant-garde has unproblematically identified itself and its nostalgic products with the softwares and hardwares marketed by a new generation of corporations. These corporations have in turn marketed themselves as models of casual sociability and neatly packaged novelty, symptoms of an enforced togetherness under the sign of a consumerist “global village.” In that sense, the map that follows here must always be understood to harbor its architectural futures, if only as a prehistory condemned to compulsive repetition. Locked in such repetitions, we might do well to follow the command that, at IBM, applied equally to humans and to machines: “Think.” At Apple Computer, IBM’s onetime challenger, this command was to be converted in the 1990s into the coyly insipid “Think different.” Thus with each repetition, the organizational complex extends itself further—not only into the interiors of thought but into difference itself. Yet each repetition also offers an opportunity for productive misuse, and for recursion and redirection, in which thinking differently can also mean issuing a challenge by raising the stakes, which is what I have attempted here. Though each subsequent stage in the development of the organizational complex has been shot through with countertrends, resistances, innovations, and critical rearticulations, in each is still discernible the remnants of the postwar constellation, like the delayed light emanating from a not-sodistant galaxy.

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Media organize. To be sure, they also communicate; they transmit messages, circulate signs. But to leave it at that is to fail to grasp the significance—for architecture—of Marshall McLuhan’s dictum “The medium is the message.” For in the cybernetically organized universe in which McLuhan made his home, it was precisely organization that was communicated—as both message and medium, image and effect, form and function—through the multimedia channels that never ceased to fascinate him. There, where architecture was both humbled and enchanted by its own status as one among many media, is where we begin, by reconstructing a small fragment of that tangled network I am calling the organizational complex. In 1948 mathematician Norbert Wiener chose the subtitle Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine for Cybernetics, a text that launched the interdisciplinary research program of the same name. The book itself is alternately limited

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and far-reaching in scope, evidencing Wiener’s reluctance to generalize his scientific research into other domains, even as he acknowledges the possibility of such an undertaking and its pursuit by many of his colleagues. But Wiener’s reluctance to translate scientific hypotheses concerning natural or technological processes into an operative social theory stemmed from a practical rather than a theoretical problem: the difficulty of obtaining social data of sufficient breadth, depth, and objectivity. He does not hesitate to diagnose social imbalances as symptoms of communicative imbalances. Nor does he hesitate to suggest that the informatic devices constructed and studied by cybernetics—such as the hypothetical chess-playing machine he describes in his concluding comments—are capable of approximating the communicative intelligence of humans. Wiener merely notes that any endeavors to treat society as if it were such a machine would inevitably be confronted with insufficient, incomplete, or tainted data. Accordingly, “there is much we must leave, whether we like it or not, to the un-‘scientific,’ narrative method of the professional historian.”1 The theoretical basis on which any “scientific” extensions of cybernetics might be undertaken is marked in Wiener’s subtitle and implicit throughout the book as a common ground of “communication” regulating the behavior of both organisms and the new information-processing machines. In theory, the means by which social imbalances might be regulated—if that were practically possible—is what Wiener’s subtitle identifies as “control.” Symptomatically, in defining his terms here, Wiener himself has recourse to something resembling what he calls the “narrative method of the professional historian.” Having declared that “the thought of every age is reflected in its technique,” he goes on to suggest that “if the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries are the age of clocks, and the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries constitute the age of steam engines, the present time is the age of communication and control.” And so he observes of the study of automata (“whether in the metal or in the flesh”) that “scarcely a month passes but a new book appears on these so-called control mechanisms, or servomechanisms, and the present age is as truly the age of servomechanisms as the nineteenth century was the age of the steam engine or the eighteenth century the age of the clock.”2 Forty years later, and in the wake of numerous studies of an emergent, technologically differentiated epoch,3 Gilles Deleuze made a similar historical observation, with at least one important difference. For Deleuze, as for his colleague Michel Foucault, observable parallels between technological and social processes were based not on the instrumental application of scientific techniques or social theory but on their mutual imbrication in relations of power and knowledge: One can of course see how each kind of society corresponds to a particular kind of machine—with simple mechanical machines

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1.1

corresponding to sovereign societies, thermodynamic machines to disciplinary societies, cybernetic machines and computers to control societies. But the machines don’t explain anything, you have to analyze the collective apparatuses of which the machines are just one component. Compared with the approaching forms of ceaseless control in open sites, we may come to see the harshest confinement as part of a wonderful happy past. The quest for “universals of communication” ought to make us shudder.4

Machines based on the conversion of energy to motor power occupied a privileged position within the nineteenth-century constellation that begat modern subjectivities and modern forms of collective experience, configuring relations of force around processes of displacement and aligning their trajectories in the railroad, the assembly line, and, eventually, the automobile. As Anson Rabinbach has shown, an energetics informed by the second law of thermodynamics provided the framework through which the bodies moving along these trajectories could be theorized as fields of force, and diagrammed by scientists like Etienne-Jules Marey, in what Rabinbach calls a “physiognomy of labor power.”5 These developments in turn flowed from the emergence of biology as a fully codified science, rearranging the terms of the earlier debate between mechanism and vitalism into a new and multifaceted organicism. Indeed, by the early part of the nineteenth century, organization, or the pattern of relationships binding the organs together and integrating their individual functions into a coordinated whole, was a privileged term, designating at least one condition of possibility for life itself. Such an attentiveness to the integration of structure and function within the organism was subsequently extended to the organism’s relation with what Auguste Comte called its milieu, or environment. And with the work of the physiologist Claude Bernard, the notion of the milieu intérieur, or interior environment, was introduced to describe the internal space in which the regulatory functions of organisms are performed. The resulting tripartite assemblage—structure, function, environment—came to define the regulatory processes of organized (and thereby organic) bodies conceived as internal combustion engines.6 The field of comparative anatomy saw a related shift when Georges Cuvier broke down the totality of known organisms into four mutually exclusive branches on the basis of their organizational “plan,” according to which each organ was seen to

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perform a specific function in the service of the whole.7 It is to this taxonomic fragmentation of life itself, in which the great continuous chain of being ramified into the unbridgeable discontinuities separating Cuvier’s branches, that Deleuze refers when he reminds us (in his book-length essay on Foucault) that in the nineteenth century “the co-ordination and subordination of characteristics in a plant or animal—in brief, an organizing force—imposes a division of organisms which can no longer be aligned but tends to develop on its own.”8 A distributional imperative that proves constitutive of the postclassical episteme mapped by Foucault, this shift in the organism’s status is coordinated around what we can call its spatiality. As the historian of science François Jacob puts it: What was radically transformed at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was, therefore, the way in which living beings were arranged in space: not only the space in which all beings were disposed, broken into separate islands and carved into independent series—but also the space in which the organism took up its abode, coiled round a nucleus, formed by successive layers that extended beyond the living being, linking it to its surroundings. It was both the relations established between the parts of an organism and those uniting all living bodies that were entirely redistributed.9 From cell to milieu, and notwithstanding the manifest distinctions between these various approaches, the organism was thus integrated into a bounded whole in which, as in the panoptic machines through which Foucault articulated the disciplinary epoch, everything was in its place. This effort to think about the organism on its own terms—as an organic totality—thus yielded what Jacob calls a spatialization of organic bodies “in depth.” Holding it all together was an invisible “secret architecture” (Jacob) or “hidden architecture” (Foucault)—what Jacob terms a “second-order structure” (organization) in which the parts are distributed and their individual functions coordinated. But this architecture also brings with it a degree of epistemological confusion. With Bernard and others, the biological notion of organic integration, particularly in the form of the cell theory, was initially articulated through an economic and political model that compared the integration of the unit (the cell) into the whole of the organism to the integration of the individual into society. While enabling biologists to accord priority to integration over simple mechanical assembly, this comparison was eventually challenged by a physiologically based project in which, in the words of Georges Canguilhem, “the organism is its own model,” since “[f ]or an organism, organization is a fact; for a society, organization is a goal.”10

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1.2

All of this was subject to revision with the emergence of cybernetics, communications theory, and systems theory during the middle of the twentieth century. The confusion remains, however. Social, biological, technological, and aesthetic space are networked together in Norbert Wiener’s “age of communication and control.” And architecture is right there with them, in more ways than one. Returning to the “control society,” we find that Deleuze also distinguishes control from the techniques of spatial confinement characteristic of disciplinary regimes, on the basis of a networklike spatiality: “Confinements are molds, different moldings, while controls are a modulation [e.g., the modulation of signals], like a self-transmuting molding continually changing from one moment to the next, or like a sieve whose mesh varies from one point to another.”11 The irreducibility of this “control society” to its techne¯ —even as certain network-based technologies are decisively implicated in it—or to its modulated structure suggests that along with cybernetic machines, certain aesthetic techniques might also belong to that collective apparatus dedicated to what Deleuze calls “the approaching forms of ceaseless control in open sites.” Architecture’s own techne¯ , suspended between art and science in the discourse of the period, thus forms multiple, complex links with this apparatus. But in what way does a cybernetic regime modify what Jacob describes as “the way in which living beings [are] arranged in space”—the organicist integration of components in a milieu ranging from interior to exterior? And with respect to feedback loops that bring the outside back in, how do we confront the history and theory of communications networks from within the logic of these same networks? Unlike the confined, molded institutional spaces of disciplines (e.g., architecture), these are systems of modulation with no absolute inside or outside, interminably “open sites” where we perpetually traverse domains (“outside” architecture—e.g., cybernetics) in which we appear to have no business operating in the first place. In this supposedly postdisciplinary epoch, has not the discipline from which we write become itself merely a modulation of interconnected networks and knowledge banks?

In a letter dated 28 March 1951, a young Herbert Marshall McLuhan introduces himself to Wiener by declaring that “as a friend and student of Sigfried Giedion’s I have paid special attention to your Cybernetics and The Human Use of Human Beings,”12 Wiener’s two most widely read books. Given the free use McLuhan would later make of cybernetic principles like feedback in his own work, it is not

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surprising that he contacts Wiener at this early date. Slightly more surprising, perhaps, is his use of Giedion’s name as a reference. Yet a year before McLuhan’s letter, Giedion, too, corresponded with Wiener, thanking him for the opportunity to attend a meeting of the Inter-science Committee at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (where Wiener taught), before which he was later invited to speak. In less than perfect English, he expresses solidarity: “I felt reconforted, because thoughts & ideas, which I had to work out lonely for many years are growing in your circle by the force of similar circumstances.”13 By the time he wrote those words, Giedion had already conducted his own series of case histories of everyday mechanical objects and systems in Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (1948), researched and written in the United States from 1941 to 1945. The book is an allegory that needs little decoding. It is unnecessary for Giedion even to name Hiroshima or Auschwitz, which, in the book as in history, actualized the mechanized death for which modernity had been preparing itself for an entire century.14 For Giedion, ghostwriter of modern architecture’s dreams, runaway mechanization could be controlled only by subordinating it to what he calls “human needs.” Under such conditions, mechanization is forced to double back on itself—first by responding to rudimentary biological needs, such as the need for food and shelter, and second by recalibrating the human body to withstand the destabilizing effects of its own prosthetic supplementarity, in an adaptation to the constant change resulting from scientific and technological progress. This feedback loop is the basis for what Giedion calls “dynamic equilibrium,” a balanced state of flux and interchange between individual and environment. Its prime agent, according to Giedion, is to be a new human type, a “man in equipoise,” capable of balancing irreconcilable forces. Cryptically, Giedion adds the caveat that “we should not have dared to suggest the new type of man our period calls for if physiology had not discovered astonishingly parallel trends,” listing as evidence the work of a variety of scientists, including Claude Bernard and Walter B. Cannon.15 Half a century after Bernard’s studies of physiological self-regulation, Cannon had developed the notion of homeostasis to describe the body’s ability to maintain certain functions (such as temperature) in a steady state and to restore its internal processes to equilibrium following moments of excitement or disruption. In doing so, he took up once again the analogy between biological and social processes, concluding his 1932 classic, The Wisdom of the Body, with an epilogue titled “Relations of Biological and Social Homeostasis.”16 Extrapolating from the biological to the technological domain, with the stage set by the biosocial hypotheses of figures like Cannon, Giedion thus (implicitly) uses “dynamic equilibrium” to invoke organic homeostasis as a model for the restoration of balance in an environment overrun with machines.

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Dedicated to the neurophysiologist Arturo Rosenblueth, Wiener’s collaborator and Cannon’s colleague, Cybernetics is the first systematic exposition of the research conducted by Wiener, Rosenblueth, and others on parallels between communications networks and the human nervous system. Cannon’s work represents an important precedent for this hypothesis, which explains in part Giedion’s recognition of an affinity between his own work and that of Wiener. Cybernetics takes its title from kyberne¯te¯s, the Greek term for “steersman”; kyberne¯te¯s is also the root of the English term “governor,” which is applied to devices that regulate the performance of machines (as in the governor of a steam engine). Extending concepts originating in nineteenth-century thermodynamics into systems of information measurement and management, Wiener defines information in relation to its opposite: entropy. The second law of thermodynamics holds that the overall level of entropy, or disorder, tends probabilistically to increase in any closed system. Wiener proposes that like energy, the amount of information, or “negentropy,” within a system is subject to a similar process of breaking down and leveling off, also measurable as entropy. Conversely, the degree of antientropic, informational organization in cybernetic systems is regulated through feedback, a continuous cycling of information (obtained by artificial “sense organs”) back into a system to correct its course, consolidate its form, or modify its output. Wiener developed his theory of feedback through wartime research on electromechanical systems designed, in his words, “to usurp a specifically human function.”17 In an early project for an antiaircraft firing mechanism, for example,Wiener proposed a device, called an antiaircraft predictor, capable of obtaining information on the position and velocity of the aircraft and making the necessary calculations regarding its trajectory—a task previously performed by an individual known as a “computer”—as well as anticipating and factoring in the pilot’s future behavior.18 Although Wiener’s proposal was never fully realized, the notion of machine-to-human and machine-to-machine feedback contained therein is central to his science of communication. More generally, Cybernetics postulates morphological and functional parallels between the human nervous system and early information-processing devices by, among other things, comparing nerve synapses to vacuum tubes.19 Thus the feedback loops and servomechanisms on which Wiener had begun working at the same time that Giedion was writing Mechanization Takes Command represented both the diagrams and the material components from which the “new type of man” announced by Giedion could potentially be assembled. There are no surprises here: since the 1920s, the “new man” and his organs had been appearing in avant-gardist discourse, including that of Giedion’s friend László Moholy-Nagy (whose advice Giedion acknowledges in his preface). Moholy-Nagy, who died two years before Mechanization Takes Command appeared, had long been advocating conscious self-adaptation to technological advances in the form of a “new vision,” and his mark is visible throughout

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Giedion’s book. Moholy-Nagy argued that the ubiquity of rapid movement in all aspects of modern life necessitated a biological adaptation of the human visual apparatus, aided by experimental photography, in order to process visual information received at greater speed than ever before (very much like Wiener’s antiaircraft apparatus, with its proposed replacement of the human “computer” with a technological device).20 Consequently, Marey’s chronophotography was one point of departure for photographic work, such as that done by Harold Edgerton at MIT, that informed Moholy-Nagy’s own aesthetic experiments with the human sensorium. Giedion, for his part, identifies Marey’s documentation of the body as an integrated assemblage of functional vectors working in harmony as a basis for the links among science, social organization, and aesthetics forged in his chapter on the time and motion studies of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth and Frederick Winslow Taylor, and their counterparts in modern art.21 While in the United States researching Mechanization Takes Command, Giedion also wrote prefatory remarks for Language of Vision, a landmark effort to codify a new syntax for optical communication that was published in 1944 by Moholy-Nagy’s friend and colleague at the Institute of Design in Chicago, the artist and visual theorist Gyorgy Kepes. In his comments Giedion commends Kepes, who utilizes numerous examples from contemporary graphic design and advertising, for attempting to introduce principles of formal coherence into the images saturating everyday life. In his own introduction, Kepes sounds many of the themes that Giedion would later reiterate in Mechanization Takes Command. Most notably, he laments the chaotic disorganization and formlessness of modern life, which he attributes to “our failure in the organization of that new equipment with which we must function if we are to maintain our equilibrium in a dynamic world.”22 Giedion and McLuhan had met in St. Louis a few years earlier, in 1939. McLuhan later acknowledged his intellectual debt to Giedion, indicating that after the encounter “I naturally studied him more intensely and used his methods in my own work.”23 So when Mechanization Takes Command appeared, it became an important reference for McLuhan in his own research into the technologically generated by-products of modernity. This research was published in 1951 as The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, a series of commentaries on advertisements found in newspapers and popular magazines. Like Kepes, McLuhan felt himself confronted with a visual landscape out of control, an entropic “maelstrom” of mechanically produced images used to manipulate an unsuspecting public rather than to communicate openly with them. In his words, such a “whirling phantasmagoria can be grasped only when arrested for contemplation. And this very arrest is also a release from the usual participation.”24 It was at this time—upon the publication of The Mechanical Bride—that McLuhan first approached Wiener to solicit his opinion of the book, which had already been marked by McLuhan’s encounter with Giedion, whose own earlier correspon-

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dence with Wiener was noted above. Wiener had just published The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, dedicated to elaborating to a nonspecialist audience his thesis that “the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback.”25 Here Wiener speculates on the capacity of the new machines, which he refers to as “communicative organisms,” to regulate social relations by supplementing human intelligence. In doing so, he repeatedly invokes the well-worn analogy between biological organization and social organization, except that the organizational systems in question have now changed. The epistemological status of the two categories underwriting the comparison—the organism and the machine—has also changed. At both levels, the change is registered in specifically spatial terms. Discussing what he calls “communicative behavior,” Wiener argues that a community of ants is characterized by rigid, protofascistic social organization. He observes that the ant’s lack of a respiratory system limits it to a certain size, beyond which it could not function with any degree of efficiency. He illustrates this constraint by comparing a cottage and a skyscraper. Whereas a cottage requires no specialized ventilation system, a skyscraper, with its rooms within rooms, is habitable only if equipped with a sophisticated means for circulating and exchanging air. The same goes for the nervous system. Wiener argues that what counts is not the size of the basic components (such as neurons, which are similar in humans and ants) but their organization, which determines the “absolute size” of an organism’s nervous system—its upper limit of growth and index of social advancement. An organism’s social potential, conceived in terms of its ability to organize into complex communications networks, is thus measured as a function of the size of its internal circulatory and communications systems, which is a function, in turn, of their own organizational complexity. The original analogy between the social and biological organism is thus collapsed, as the two become directly linked as part of the same network. The organism’s previous depth is also flattened out, as the distribution of the body’s organs, or compartments (like the rooms within rooms of a skyscraper), becomes a function of the networks that service and regulate them. A relational logic of flexible connection replaces a mechanical logic of rigid compartmentalization, and the decisive organizational factor is no longer the vertical subordination of parts to whole but rather the degree to which the connections permit, regulate, and respond to informational flows in all directions. Furthermore, in a technologically mediated social environment, machines capable of performing such regulatory functions begin to assume a human character. According to Wiener (in the significantly revised second edition of The Human Use of Human Beings), if the ant’s inability to learn and the relative perfection of its performance from birth make it comparable to a “computing machine whose instructions are all set forth in advance on the tapes,” then the

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human being is comparable to an information system able to learn and thus adapt to its environment based on feedback: “Theoretically, if we could build a machine whose mechanical structure duplicated human physiology, then we could have a machine whose intellectual capacities would duplicate those of human beings.”26 “Organization as Message” is the title of the book’s fifth chapter, in which Wiener proposes what he misleadingly calls a “metaphor” wherein “the organism is seen as message.”27 He begins the chapter by characterizing homeostatic processes as those by which an organism maintains its level of organization in an otherwise entropic environment. For Wiener, It is the pattern maintained by this homeostasis which is the touchstone of our personal identity. Our tissues change as we live: the food we eat and the air we breathe become flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, and the momentary elements of our flesh and bone pass out of our body every day with our excreta. We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves. A pattern is a message, and may be transported as a message.28 What differentiates this cybernetic notion of the organism from its nineteenth-century predecessors is not so much the idea of the pattern as such, nor the flux of matter passing incessantly through this pattern, but rather the pattern’s newly acquired status as “message.” Ultimately, the organism’s identity—its resistance to the entropic flood of de-differentiation, whereby it maintains a difference with everything that is not itself—is based not on its flesh, its material body, but on a materially transmissible body of information. Wiener sees the physical body as nothing but pattern; moreover it is a pattern that can be transported (hypothetically) over telephone lines. To illustrate this point, he chooses the example of an architect: To see the greater importance of the transportation of information as compared with mere physical transportation, let us suppose that we have an architect in Europe supervising the construction of a building in the United States. I am assuming, of course, an adequate working staff of constructors, clerks of the works,etc.,on the site of the construction. Under these conditions, even without transmitting or receiving any material commodities, the architect may take an active part in the construction of the building. Let him draw up plans and specifications as usual. Even at present, there is no reason why the working copies of these

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plans and specifications must be transmitted to the construction site on the same paper on which they have been drawn up in the drafting room. Ultrafax gives a means by which a facsimile of all the documents concerned may be transmitted in a fraction of a second, and the received copies are quite as good working plans as the originals. The architect may be kept up to date with the progress of the work by photographic records taken every day or several times a day; and these may be forwarded back to him by Ultrafax, or teletypewriter. In short, the bodily transmission of the architect and his documents may be replaced very effectively by the message-transmission of communications which do not entail the moving of a particle of matter from one end of the line to the other.29 This illustration is only a prelude for speculation on the telephonic transmissibility of the human body itself as an organizational pattern, speculation that Wiener readily admits contains heavy doses of fantasy but nevertheless sets a defining limit for his version of the organism as information system. It relies on a notion of embodiment grounded in patterned integrity rather than in spatial extension. The body as “communicative organism” is, for Wiener, to be understood as a vortex of data whose integrity is maintained homeostatically by virtue of its linkages to physical communications networks. Its materiality, and the materiality of all bodies, has not been superseded but has rather been reformulated. Wiener’s reformulation of the body’s organizational logics as “message” also bears traces of a reflexivity—in the form of feedback—related to that of the “control society.” For if the organism is fundamentally pattern (like the architect’s design in Wiener’s example), the instantiation and maintenance of this pattern depend not only on the availability of raw materials but also on the preexistence of a material substrate of communications systems (like the “Ultrafax” and the telephone lines). To the extent that bodies are understood as a function of their internal communications systems, which are in turn connected into social and technological networks to which they respond through feedback, the outer limits of the organism begin to erode even further than they did in the earlier milieu intérieur–external environment assemblage. The terms interior and exterior ultimately lose their meaning, since each point in the network is engaged in a two-way relationship with every other point, in what Deleuze calls a “modulation.” This system, as well as any point within it, is reflexive to the degree that it is self-regulating and not merely acting in reciprocity with an external environment, having already incorporated the “environment” into itself through feedback. For Deleuze, “the digital language of control is made up of codes indicating whether access to some information should be allowed or denied. We’re no longer

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dealing with a duality of mass and individual. Individuals become ‘dividuals’ and masses become samples, data, markets, or ‘banks.’”30 Consequently, the mark of identity is transferred from the signature, the trace of the physical body, to the password— a code that connects the subject with its own externalized databanks. Progressive individualization, in the form of personalized codes through which the subject interfaces with the market, is really progressive “dividualization,” or the internal splitting of subjectivity into subsets of data. And the “self”—what Wiener calls the human organism’s “personal identity”—is constituted through the exchange of codes (in the form of organizational patterns circulating across the network), while the network it-self that supports the circulation is constituted reflexively through those very patterns. There is no outside, or inside. At this point, we are reminded of Foucault’s comments before the Parisian Architectural Studies Circle in 1967, when, having identified a new spatiality he calls “emplacement,” he takes up a cybernetic idiom: Further, we are aware of the importance of problems of emplacement in contemporary engineering: the storage of information or of the partial results of a calculation in the memory of a machine, the circulation of discrete elements, with a random output (such as, quite simply, automobiles or in fact the tones on a telephone line), the identification of tagged or coded elements in an ensemble that is either distributed haphazardly or sorted in a univocal classification, or sorted according to a plurivocal classification, and so on.31 The text in which Foucault made these comments also articulated his notion of “heterotopia” in concretely spatial terms that would prove influential to the subsequent architectural reception of his thought. Central to this reception has been Foucault’s later interpretation (in Discipline and Punish, 1975) of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon as a diagram of spatial relations characteristic of nineteenth-century discipline. But already here, in Foucault’s early comments to architects, we see another diagram emerging that, by the second half of the twentieth century, marks the dispersal of the panoptic model into diffuse networks of control.32 Like Wiener, Foucault does not differentiate between the circulation of physical bodies (automobiles) and the movement of information (“tones on a telephone line”). Both are submitted to a regime of coding that tracks and manages their movements through infrastructural networks whose dynamics are reducible to what he calls “the problem of knowing what relations of proximity, what type of storage, of circulation, of identification, of classification of human elements are to be preferentially retained in this or that situation to obtain this or that result.”33

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As is also implied by Foucault’s choice of examples, the conversion of the organic domain into a problem of coding renders the boundary separating organisms from machines, and especially Deleuze’s “cybernetic machines and computers,” increasingly permeable. One effect of this permeability is to further destabilize distinctions between scientific, technological, and sociological knowledge, despite Wiener’s reservations.34 In describing the human organism as a node in an information system, cybernetics does not distinguish between human-to-human and human-to-machine communication. It also raises the possibility that humans could be left out of the loop altogether—a new version of the paranoid fantasy of machines dominating humans to which both McLuhan and Wiener allude. Moreover, cybernetics becomes the basis for renewed comparisons between organic bodies and social structures, in which technologically mediated social relations develop under the shadow of a pathological tendency toward entropy. Thus cybernetics is not just one more instance of a correlation between machines and the societies in which they exist. Despite its vaguely humanistic overtones, it actively theorizes the dissolution of the human organism’s “humanity.” It links up bodies, machines, and societies into one vast network, at precisely the same moment that the very existence of humanity is also threatened by its own scientific and technological development. This linking of organism, machine, and socius is so radically destabilizing that “organization” is called in to integrate the entire matrix into a self-regulating totality and to restore its homeostatic organicity. Unfortunately, the force of this organizational imperative leaves little room for an alternate, more volatile “body,” for which Deleuze has another name: “If I call it the body without organs, it is because it is opposed to all the strata of organization— those of the organism, but also the organization of power. It is the totality of the organizations of the body that will break apart the plane or the field of immanence and impose another type of ‘plane’ on desire, in each case stratifying the body without organs.”35 What is more, for Wiener as for Giedion—both writing in the context of the cold war and the arms race—not only had mechanization taken command, but there was a need to appeal to science for a defense against itself and the weapons it had produced. In Wiener’s words, it mattered little “whether we entrust our decisions to machines of metal, or to those machines of flesh and blood which are bureaus and vast laboratories and armies and corporations.”36 Here emerge the full implications of Wiener’s “human use of human beings,” a title that further encodes the reflexivity of the entire situation. This is not about preserving the “human” by restricting its contact with machines. It is about steering the organized human-machines named by Wiener back toward something like “humanity.” This “humanity,” characterized by total communicational transparency, is to be reconstituted as a biosocial organism protected by its organizational robustness from weapons that are themselves produced

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and deployed by highly organized “machines of metal” and “machines of flesh and blood,” since for Wiener, “the effect of these weapons must be to increase the entropy of this planet, until all distinction of hot and cold, good and bad, man and matter have vanished in the formation of the white furnace of a new star.”37

With the above concerns in mind, we can now consider the peculiar moment when urbanism makes an appearance in Wiener’s public career. In the 18 December 1950 issue of Life magazine, an article under the title “How U.S. Cities Can Prepare for Atomic War” outlined a proposal by Wiener and two of his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, political theorist Karl Deutsch and historian of science Giorgio de Santillana, for the decentralization of urban infrastructures to mitigate the aftermath of a nuclear strike.38 Arguing that the panic and chaos caused by the breakdown of transportation and communication lines would potentially be far more devastating than the direct effects of the explosion itself, the plan called for the construction of exurban “life belts”—infrastructural networks in radial patterns around every major American city. These networks were designed to control and direct the flow of traffic toward safe areas at the urban periphery during the hours immediately following a nuclear detonation aimed at the concentration of people, goods, and services in the city centers, while also providing bypass routes for major railroads and highways. Wiener was the primary author of the plan, which appeared soon after The Human Use of Human Beings as a strategic deployment of that work’s organizational principles. Indeed, a draft version of the explanatory text written partly in Wiener’s hand declares: “We have conceived the city as a net of communications and of traffic. The danger of blocked communications in a city subject to emergency conditions is analogous to the danger of blocked communications in the human body.”39 It follows, then, that just as a skyscraper is a more developed organism than a cottage, and humans are socially more advanced (in principle) than ants, so too this proposed city is to be understood as a giant “communicative organism.” The city extends the human nervous system in the name of what Giedion would have called “equipoise,” reaching outward to maintain equilibrium and to overcome the entropic effects of traffic jams and communications breakdowns in the wake of nuclear bombardment by providing multiple, redundant pathways.

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1.1 Norbert Wiener, Karl Deutsch, and Giorgio de Santillana, opening page of “How U.S. Cities Can Prepare for Atomic War,” Life, 18 December 1950, 76–77. 1.2 Norbert Wiener, Karl Deutsch, and Giorgio de Santillana, “life belts.” From “How U.S. Cities Can Prepare for Atomic War,” Life, 18 December 1950, 78–79.

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1.3 Norbert Wiener, Karl Deutsch, and Giorgio de Santillana, existing urban hubs. From “How U.S. Cities Can Prepare for Atomic War,” Life, 18 December 1950, 80–81. 1.4 (bottom left) Norbert Wiener, Karl Deutsch, and Giorgio de Santillana, typical city. From “How U.S. Cities Can Prepare for Atomic War,” Life, 18 December 1950, 78. 1.5 (bottom right) Norbert Wiener, Karl Deutsch, and Giorgio de Santillana, proposed city. From “How U.S. Cities Can Prepare for Atomic War,” Life, 18 December 1950, 79.

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What the plan’s authors call “defense-by-communications” is also what distinguishes this project’s schematic urbanism from other postwar civil defense planning strategies advocating decentralization.40 As Wiener’s revised notion of entropy indicates, the focus is not on the direct effects produced by the energy expended in a nuclear detonation but rather on the ensuing interference in communicational flows. Proposals such as the physicist Ralph Lapp’s diagrams for linear or satellite cities or Ludwig Hilberseimer’s decentralization plans, vividly illustrated with diagrams showing the geographic extent of an atomic blast, all defend against the thermodynamic effects of the bomb.41 In contrast, the strategy proposed by Wiener and his colleagues defends primarily against the breakdown of the information and transportation systems regulating the city’s equilibrium. For Wiener, the nuclear arms race was also the very figure of a science out of control, a runaway technological juggernaut riding a wave of mistrust and deceit. Like many scientists, he was shocked by Hiroshima; after the bomb was dropped he actively resisted involvement in military projects. Though somewhat fatalistic about the complicity of science in domination, Wiener continued to insist that science use its own knowledge and techniques to regulate itself and the society in which it exists. In The Human Use of Human Beings, he quotes from a critical French review of Cybernetics:

1.6 City “X” diagram. From Ralph E. Lapp, “Atomic Bomb Explosions—Effects on an American City,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 4, no. 2 (February 1948): 51.

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1.7 Ralph Lapp, New York City diagram. From Must We Hide? (1949), 83.

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1.8 Ralph Lapp, “rodlike” city, “doughnut” city, and “satellite” city (top to bottom). From Must We Hide? (1949), 162–164.

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Can’t one even conceive a State apparatus covering all systems of political decisions, either under a regime of many states distributed over the earth, or under the apparently much more simple regime of a human government of this planet? At present nothing prevents our thinking of this. We may dream of the time when the machine à gouverner [the cybernetic machine] may come to supply—whether for good or evil—the present inadequacy of the brain when the latter is concerned with the customary machinery of politics.42 In citing this reviewer,Wiener evokes the same communicative transparency between science and society promoted by groups such as that formed immediately after the war around the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.43 But in the United States, there exists a more familiar marker for the realignment of power within the “state apparatus” that followed the technological, logistical, and economic rupture of the Second World War. On 17 January 1961, in his farewell speech to the American people, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against the “unwarranted influence” of the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry,” becoming the first in a long line of theorists of what he called the “military-industrial complex.” As Eisenhower put it, “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”44 The irony of these remarks is not confined to Eisenhower’s biography as

1.9 Ludwig Hilberseimer, radius of hydrogen bomb blast. From The Nature of Cities (1955), 283.

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both an agent and a symptom of the very forces he identifies, including his early support for a national science foundation that would formalize the close ties developed among science, business, and the military during the war.45 What is more significant is the way in which Eisenhower’s formulation brought together institutions, technology, and power. Inscribed in the expression “unwarranted influence” is a relation wherein power works instrumentally in the interest of a shadowy elite operating outside the parameters of everyday civil society. But as is demonstrated by the extensive scholarship that has arisen on the topic, the membership of the military-industrial complex is, if anything, characterized by a certain brazen visibility.46 It was Eisenhower’s own secretary of defense, former General Motors president Charles E. Wilson, who flatly declared that what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Even more, the corporations vying for defense contracts during the 1950s, and the various government agencies distributing them, relied heavily on public relations to construct the sense of self-evident necessity that legitimized their very existence. The instrumentality of “unwarranted influence” conceals a mutation in which cross-disciplinary knowledge banks and interinstitutional transmission systems—systems existing precisely between institutions like the military and the corporations—become the locus and the test site for the new forms of sociopolitical regulation that both Wiener and Deleuze call “control.” In this sense, Eisenhower’s spectacularization of the military-industrial complex, by resorting to the oddly reassuring terminology of central command, serves to obscure rather than reveal the relevant power-knowledge dynamic. Among those most often credited with contributing to the critical resonance of such terminology is the sociologist C. Wright Mills, who, in The Power Elite (1956), announced (and denounced) the existence of an increasingly centralized concentration of power at what he called “command posts” within that stratum of American society occupied by corporate executives, military “warlords,” and political leaders.47 One of Mills’s harshest critics was his fellow sociologist Talcott Parsons, who viewed Mills’s assessment of an uneven distribution of power as exceedingly conspiratorial. Moreover, Parsons found Mills indifferent to the possibility that even should such a nexus exist, nothing prevents it from integrating its goals into those of society as a whole.48 This organicist subordination of the individual will to the imperatives of the whole underlies the bulk of Parsons’s own theory of social organization, of which his critique of Mills constitutes a part. By 1960 Parsons’s neo-Weberian studies of integrated organizational systems had also absorbed the cybernetic lexicon. For example, he lists a “communicative complex,” saturated with “feedback” and “noise,” as one of four components in the “principle structures of community,” reflecting “a sense in which human personality and society must be fitted into the ancient concept pair of biological theory: organism and environment.”49 Nevertheless, it was Karl Deutsch, Wiener’s

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collaborator on the Life project, who most explicitly extended cybernetic principles into a theory of sociopolitical regulation. In The Nerves of Government: Models of Political Communication and Control (1963), Deutsch outlines a political theory based on what he calls a “limited structural correspondence” between a cybernetic command-control nexus and “political communication,” proposing a state steered by the “nerves” of the body politic rather than governed by “muscular” power relations.50 He characterizes his approach as transforming the static “ideal types” of Max Weber into “relatively full-fledged models of communication and control,” or as adding “search criteria,” in the form of “particular patterns of goal-seeking and goal-setting, self-steering and feedback,” to the structural-functional approach of Parsons and his contemporary Robert K. Merton.51 Furthermore, Deutsch extends the “general interchange model” of Parsons, in which a social system is made up of four functional subsystems—internal pattern maintenance, adaptation to environmental conditions, goal attainment, and integration of functions into a coordinated whole—to a theory of political power. As a result, power quantifiable as “force” is converted into a kind of “currency” merely flowing through the system, thereby reducing its claim on what Deutsch calls the “essence of politics.” The new essential that replaces it, which for the most part Deutsch also designates as “control,” is underwritten by a cybernetic organicism: “the dependable coordination of human efforts and expectations for the attainment of the goals of the society.”52 Thus the hierarchical power structure identified by Mills and absorbed into the discourse on the military-industrial complex is overlaid with a systemic notion of power—as control—theorized by figures such as Parsons and Deutsch.53 Control, naturalized by the organism, becomes the linchpin of a technocratic program of diagnosing and correcting societal imbalances through an organizational dynamics. But the totalizing imperatives of organization, and the attendant project of optimizing performativity through a feedback-based responsiveness, remain untouched.54 As an externalization of the homeostatic apparatus of the human nervous system, the antinuclear city appearing in Life can thus be said to correspond to the state apparatus foreseen by Wiener (and his critics) and celebrated by Deutsch, as it attempts to supplement human intelligence during a moment of profound disorientation and to steer society out of its scientifically induced confusion. But this urban planning project also represents an early convergence of cybernetic spatial and technological strategies that would work to supplement the institutions of the state with the more diffuse organizational protocols of the control society. By the time the project was published in 1950, the existing state apparatus was already conditioned by the networks organizing the military-industrial complex named by Eisenhower a decade later. For example, in 1949 the Soviet Union—to the surprise of the American military establishment—tested its first nuclear device, and by 1950 it was rumored that the Soviets had overtaken the United States in the arms

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race. Concerned that its preemptive policy of “prompt use” of nuclear weapons would be ineffective against a strengthened enemy, the United States began to explore early warning defense options. The result was a comprehensive, computer-controlled air defense network called the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, or SAGE. Implementing this system required the combined efforts of the U.S. military, International Business Machines, Western Electric, Bell Laboratories, MIT’s Lincoln Laboratories, the Rand Corporation, and many other organizations, with numerous technical innovations in the areas of computer hardware, software, interface, and networking, including digital transmission over telephone lines. SAGE was described by one Air Force colonel as “a servomechanism spread over an area comparable to the whole American continent.”55 In this sense, the infrastructure of weapons systems like SAGE materialized many of the key components in the communications networks that Wiener saw as theoretically necessary to realize the full organizational potential of cybernetics. Conversely, Wiener’s own “defense-by-communications” proposal must also be counted among these weapons systems, at two levels. First, it uses many of the same techniques—decentralization, redundancy, information management, feedback—to defend against and regulate the entropic effects of imminent atomic catastrophe that constitute the primary justification for the collaboration of science, industry, and the state embodied in the very idea of the military-industrial complex. But second, in a kind of cybernetic feedback loop, it also uses scientific concepts, developed in the laboratories and testing grounds of the complex, to defend against science itself. The project’s dream of communicative transparency maintained by a network of roads, highways, train lines, and telephone wires constitutes a “defense-by-communications” not only against the bomb but against the specialized, incommunicative discursive environment that created it. Through the fissures of a bipolar cold war there thus emerged a logic of control so encompassing that it aspired to the status of both material and discursive regulator, an organizational “pattern” encoded in images circulating through the same mass-media networks (including Life magazine) that McLuhan analyzed in The Mechanical Bride. Thus, while Wiener himself was often skeptical about the possibility of applying cybernetic principles to other domains, especially to the so-called human sciences, his urban planning project—with its sociopolitical overtones—is nevertheless representative of large-scale efforts on the part of cyberneticists to forge an interdisciplinary research program designed to overcome the isolating loss of perspective that they attribute to such highly specialized realms as atomic science. This dream of communicative transparency, including what Deleuze calls the quest for “universals of communication,” in fact presides over nearly all of cybernetics’ early adventures. Numbered among these is its institutionalization as an interdisciplinary science in the

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conferences sponsored by the Josiah R. Macy, Jr. Foundation that were held regularly between 1946 and 1953 and attended by leading representatives in diverse fields, from Wiener to such figures as anthropologist Margaret Mead, ethnologist Gregory Bateson, sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld, mathematician John von Neumann, and linguist Roman Jakobson.56 As always, architects and theorists of architecture were noticeably unwilling to be left out of such enterprises. Thus, writing to Wiener in early 1954, Richard Neutra lines up behind the others, declaring himself “a grateful reader and owner of your two books.”57 That same year, Neutra published Survival through Design, his own guide to the nuclear age, in which he cites both Wiener and Walter Cannon;58 he also sent Wiener a copy. In 1956 an article by Neutra titled “Inner and Outer Landscape” appeared in The New Landscape in Art and Science, edited with commentary by Gyorgy Kepes; in it, the architect announces that the continuity between microcosm and macrocosm celebrated by Kepes in his compilation of scientific images reaches “right into our own innermost physiology, the processes within our skin, within our organism, our nervous system,” and must be served by a designer who “switches on currents and cross-currents which continuously flow through the individual, the group, the physical surroundings.” 59 Included in the same volume are texts by Giedion and by Walter Gropius, with Giedion again deploring the chaos and lack of coordination in modern life, Gropius adopting Giedion’s terms—“equipoise” and “dynamic equilibrium”—to call on architecture as a means of reorienting the bewildered postwar subject, and Kepes quoting from transcripts of the Macy conferences in his commentary.60 The New Landscape in Art and Science also includes an essay by Norbert Wiener titled “Pure Patterns in a Natural World.” In this brief reflection on the mathematical elegance of the patterns embodied in a number of the photographs published by Kepes, Wiener insists—again, despite his own initial hesitancy to pursue such comparisons— that “the significance of the processes of breakdown is great not only in physics, but even in the study of sociological processes.”61 Upon receiving this text in mid-1951, Kepes wrote back to Wiener enthusiastically requesting that he elaborate further. Wiener refused, and Kepes apologetically tried again, declaring, to no avail, that “after reading your essay I saw that your contribution could be the focal point of my book.”62 But although Kepes never succeeded in extracting from Wiener more details on the correlation between aesthetic form (patterns) and resistance to social entropy, the infrastructure of the military-industrial complex around which the entire discussion was coiled makes a pointed appearance in aesthetic discourse here, when Kepes compares the human sensorium, navigating through feedback, to intelligent weaponry: “We ourselves are self-regulating systems; when we put out our hand for an apple, our movement sends back to us a continuous indication of where we are; similarly to the

1.10 (following page) Illustrations provided by Gyorgy Kepes for Norbert Wiener’s “Pure Patterns in a Natural World.” In Kepes, The New Landscape in Art and Science (1956), 276.

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guided missile, we continuously correct for error as we seek our destination.”63 Just as McLuhan observes that the delirious overproduction of advertisements unfolds into a “single landscape” possessed of its own internal logic, so Kepes sees the new landscape made visible by scientific imaging as a communicative topography made up of relational patterns whose naturally occurring equilibrium can be incorporated into art and architecture. The images themselves are used as a kind of feedback mechanism, in another effort to deploy the techniques of the “control society” to regulate its own militarism, by converting the output of science into organizational input fed back into the guided missile of the human sensorium to correct its course. This new landscape also belongs to what Kepes calls a shift from “thing-seeing” to “pattern-seeing,” where the body into which this sensorium is embedded is decisively flattened. What was once a “thing” in space, an organism made up of carefully arranged functional organs, has become, for Wiener as well as for many biologists, a communications network linked to other networks in all directions, a “pattern.”64 This reduction to the degree zero of organized patterns also seeks to resolve the conflict implied by the conjunction of art and science in Kepes’s title. If Foucault succeeded in extending the epistemological hypotheses of historians of science such as Gaston Bachelard and Canguilhem into multiple aspects of human endeavor, including the production of “man” in the “human sciences,” aesthetic questions still seem to resist formulation in epistemological terms so rooted in scientific discourse. In a sense, this resistence could impose an immediate limit on our effort to explore the implications of Foucault’s theses, and those of Deleuze, in an interdisciplinary network capable of including architecture. Conversely, it could cause us to limit our architectural inquiry to questions of technique. But here we find Kepes seeking precisely to unify art and science on the common ground of control and communication, with architecture represented as an agent of homeostatic regulation, maintaining what Giedion called “dynamic equilibrium.” It is exactly a new, aesthetically advanced biomechanical, sociotechnical “organism” that Kepes is attempting to theorize and to build with his stunning compilation of patterns in The New Landscape in Art and Science. For him, these “pure patterns in a natural world” are revealed to art by science, only to be fed back into science by art. Architecture is merely one of many media enabling the exchange. The informatic reduction on which the entire process depends is, in the long run, essentially the reduction of all biological, technological, and aesthetic input and output to patterns of ones and zeroes. It is also constitutive of what we can call the “organizational complex,” or the discursive formation from which both the technomilitarism of control systems and proposed antidotes to this militarism—including the technocratic prospect in Wiener as well as the aesthetic prospect in Kepes—sprang during the 1950s and early 1960s in response to the tendency toward entropy exhibited by those same systems.

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What remains for us to study, then, is the vast patterned network of networks left behind by this complex, an “open site” (Deleuze) wherein scientific knowledge and aesthetic strategies constantly change places in an epistemological blur. Periodically, each node in the network contributes its own modulation to the organization of “control,” such as when the American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation proved itself an equally accomplished theorist of antientropic techniques, using the occasion of its 1958 annual report to echo Wiener’s doctrine of “defense-by-communications.” As part of what the company called “building communications for a strong defense,” it revealed a strategy whereby “new telephone routes bypass critical areas to insure that essential nationwide communication will be maintained in case of disaster.” A diagram on the cover shows telephone lines being routed around major cities, so that “if these cities are destroyed, communications can bypass them.”65 The basis of this strategy was made clear three years later in another AT&T annual report that contained a manifesto, also titled “Communications for Defense,” which declares ominously that “in communications, defense of the nation comes first.”66 Here is confirmed Deleuze’s assertion that the quest for universals of communication should make us shudder. The much-advertised resilience and scope of the so-called Bell System is mobilized as a guarantee that the lines will be kept open in the face of all imaginable forms of interference, nuclear or otherwise.

1.11 Cover of the American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation, AT&T Corporation Annual Report (1958).

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Writing in a section of The New Landscape in Art and Science titled “Thing, Structure, Pattern, Process,” Gyorgy Kepes observes that “a crystal growth is not a fixed form that emerges from nowhere; it is a space-time boundary of energies in organization.”1 Kepes distinguishes the visual recognition of such emergent, fluctuating boundaries (“pattern-seeing”) from the habituated perception of static objects (“thing-seeing”). But the fact that his example actually refers to an image of the growth pattern of silicon carbide crystals generated in the research laboratories of the General Electric Corporation also indicates the proximity of what Kepes calls a “new vision” to the emergent pattern of institutional and technological networks that later became known as the military-industrial complex. More precisely, the organicism of his pattern-seeing was and is commensurate with the logic of this complex. Henceforth, according to Kepes, everything would be

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2.1 Growth pattern of silicon carbide crystals, electron micrograph, General Electric Research Laboratory. From Gyorgy Kepes, The New Landscape in Art and Science (1956), 208.

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connected to everything else through a cascading series of feedback loops. Microcosm and macrocosm, blown apart by the instruments that revealed an unrecognizable new nature in the deep space of the laboratories, would be reunited through what he called “a new common denominator of the extended scale revealed by science and the gross scale of our unaided senses.”2 This avowed modernist named his common denominator “structure,” taking care to insist that he was referring to structural patterns as traces of process, or what he called interrelated “patterns of action,” rather than as static, isolated objects. Thus the concentration of architectural imagery at the end of the book described a modern architecture at once dynamic and structural—a kind of telos diagrammed in scientific photography. Still, this explanation does not address the epistemological interface that underlay architecture’s implied position, as announced in the book’s title. For Kepes “structure,” expressed morphogenetically in photographic patterns, also represented a key point of contact between two institutions, art and science, whose mutual alienation was blamed by many for the violent effects of modernity’s latest convulsions. Kepes gradually abandons “structure” for “organization” as the book continues, revealing his revisionary ambitions even as he pays ambivalent homage to his own modernist origins. Thus he concludes, “What the new landscape suggests is not static harmony but dynamic continuity; it eludes our comprehension except as a chain of organizational levels.” Significantly, this chain of patterns seen only by a new, technologically enhanced vision finds its most prescient articulation not in static scientific photographs but in the instruments of the mass media: “Motion-picture, television and related techniques have now given us the flexibility we need to mark the time flow of images, the growth, succession, rhythm and orderly continuity of vision.”3 So even as architecture is mapped onto the new landscape of natural patterns visualized by science, it is immediately held to the standards of media that imply its potential obsolescence as an instrument of perceptual reorientation. The question, unanswered by Kepes, was whether architecture, too, could manifest the “flexibility” necessary to engage and to manage—to organize, in the manner of film and television—a dynamically changing “new landscape.” The corporate ethos of the organizational complex ultimately answered this question in the affirmative. But in order to grasp its scope, we must first explore the details of its meandering genealogical recesses.

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Trained not as a writer or theorist but rather as an artist, Kepes throughout his career played the role, alternately, of receiver and transmitter.4 Just as organized patterns of data flickered across the screens of the human-machine interfaces of the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) positioned strategically within black box–like command centers, so did luminous patterns collected from art and science flicker across the pages—and in the lecture halls and seminar rooms—activated by Kepes. And just as figures like Norbert Wiener supplied a lexicon for the new science of communication, so Kepes synthesized and processed their terminology and their discourse through an aesthetic project with roots sunk deep into earlier modernisms. Although he never studied there, Kepes retained an abiding allegiance to the German Bauhaus through his friend and Hungarian compatriot, László Moholy-Nagy. This was the Bauhaus that, with the transfer of the foundational Vorkurs (or preliminary course) into the custody of Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers in 1923,Walter Gropius had sought to convert into a laboratory to test the vectors of mechanization as they converged on architecture, formalized in his diagram published that same year that showed the concentric organization of the Bauhaus curriculum.5 And though the image of architecture harbored at the school until then was most vividly expressed in Lyonel Feininger’s woodcut of a radiant, crystalline cathedral on the cover of the Bauhaus manifesto of 1919, the organic luminosity emanating from Bruno Taut and Paul Scheerbart that underlay that image was now being passed through the prism of the machine—not to kill off the organism but to breathe new life into it. What Gropius sought in his functionalism was nothing less than an organic architecture possessed, as he put it, of an inner logic, “radiant and naked, unencumbered by lying facades and trickeries.”6 This period was also marked by the proliferation of photographic cameras among both Bauhaus students and faculty, although photography was not taught formally at the school until Walter Peterhans entered the Dessau Bauhaus in 1929. Together, Moholy-Nagy and his wife, Lucia Moholy, began to develop photographic techniques and theories that became central to the culture of the image that accompanied the infiltration of the camera into nearly all modes of Bauhaus production.7 These techniques paradoxically contributed to the primacy of the photographic im-

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age over the architectural object itself, while claiming for that object—precisely to the degree that it was transmissible as an image—a renewed organicity, via the discourse from which Kepes was to emerge. In addition to the multitude of photographic experiments thus performed, one important by-product of this convergence was a series of texts, beginning with Painting, Photography, Film (1925), volume 8 in the Bauhausbücher series. Among the brief essays collected in this volume, which were published under Moholy-Nagy’s name but for which Lucia Moholy acted variously as coauthor, editor, and “translator” of his rough German, was “Production Reproduction,” first published in the Dutch journal De Stijl in 1922.8 Its title summarizes the book’s polemic: photography is expected to produce new optical relationships, and not merely reproduce what already exists. These optical effects were addressed to the biological need of the human organism—described as a “functional mechanism”—to be exposed to ever-new sense impressions. Photography was said to possess an untapped potential for “productive creativity” in this regard, concentrated in the light-sensitivity of the photographic medium. “Photography is the manipulation of light” was a refrain repeated by MoholyNagy throughout his career. It is clear from the beginning that he understood this manipulation of the light falling onto a silver bromide plate to belong, in two senses, to a new but still wholly organic order. First, photography laid claim on the organic in seeking to extend the biological capacity of the human sensory apparatus to its outer limits.9 To that extent, photographic art would literally contribute to the evolutionary advancement of the species, by retraining human vision. Second, the photograph opens out onto the organic through its subject matter, seen dispassionately by the lens and recorded with precision on film. As evidenced by the book’s illustrations, this

2.2 Enlarged photograph of a head louse. From László MoholyNagy, Painting, Photography, Film (1925), 53.

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subject matter was not to be nature as found, but rather a new nature made visible through technological mediation.10 What also bears recognizing in Painting, Photography, Film is the sequence of media laid out in its title and followed by its texts and imagery. For Moholy-Nagy, this sequence is developmental. Painting, for example, once freed from the task of representation by the naturalistic exactitude of photography and film, can focus itself on the investigation of “pure color composition,” thereby in turn pressuring the newer media to slip out of the representational noose by their own means.11 But this reciprocity is ultimately overturned by the “from-to” structure organizing the entire book—from painting to photography to film—which brings Moholy-Nagy closer still to Marshall McLuhan’s observation, four decades later, that the content of a medium is always another medium, and registers the media-driven organicism common to both figures. For Moholy-Nagy, visual media evolve, and thus they support the further evolution of the human sensorium. Formal techniques are carried from one medium to the other, in a crescendo of effects that is judged equal to the task of mastering the new, second nature of metropolitan experience. Thus Painting, Photography, Film concludes with a layout for an unrealized film, “Dynamic of the Metropolis.” The layout’s final image is an X-ray photograph of a dead chicken: confirmation that the film’s “optical creator” (Moholy-Nagy’s term) recognized the disenchantment of metropolitan life, but also evidence of an optical instrument training its lens on a dead nature in order to impart to it a new, artificial life through the kinesthetics of the motion picture.12 This logic was crystallized in Moholy-Nagy’s second Bauhaus book, Von Material zu Architektur. Published in 1929, one year after its author’s departure from the Bauhaus, the book is a compendium of the visual experiments carried out in the Vorkurs, supplemented by a pedagogy centered on the retraining of the sensorium to adapt to the disjunctive pace of modernity. Its 1932 translation into English, The New Vision: From Material to Architecture, contributed significantly to the AngloAmerican reception of Bauhaus design theory and pedagogy. The English title makes the book’s project explicit. To the “from-to” structure of the original, with architecture as the destination, is added a “new vision” carried by photography and film. In other words, architecture is now positioned at the end of the evolutionary development, with photography and film acting as agents of advancement by providing a new visual apparatus. Condensed into the “material” named in the title are the artistic techniques taught at the Bauhaus during Moholy-Nagy’s tenure and illustrated in the book. These appear in sequence, with each element broken down according to questions of texture, form, and motion. Photography both illustrates the evolutionary development and, together with film, participates in it as it converges toward kinetic spatial construction.13 By treating each medium in its turn—painting, sculpture, and proto-

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architectural construction—as taught at the Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy again transposes aesthetic principles from one to the next. But taken together with his earlier book, Von Materiel zu Architektur also represents a significant revision of the theoretical lines established by the Bauhaus manifesto of 1919, in which Gropius sought a unity of media under a transcendent architecture. In Moholy-Nagy’s version, architecture is one medium among many, although its synthetic nature is preserved by virtue of its being last in line and the recipient of lessons learned from all other media. The final illustration in Von Materiel zu Architektur is a photomontage by Jan Kamman. Printed in negative and captioned “Architecture,” it consists of an image of the iconic Van Nelle factory in Rotterdam superimposed onto an image of a traditional Dutch townhouse. It is Moholy-Nagy’s answer to the Feininger woodcut, and its caption suggests that this type of photographically produced illusion of spatial interpenetration awaits actualization with the arrival of “glass architecture,” after which “the next generation will perhaps see buildings like this.”14 In The New Vision “glass architecture” is thus a late stage in the evolution of media, standing poised on the horizon and close to the “biological needs” of the human organism.

2.3 X-ray photograph of a dead chicken. From László MoholyNagy, sketch for Dynamic of the Metropolis (1922), in Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film (1925), 137.

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2.4 “Architecture.” Photomontage by Jan Kamman in László Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur (1929), 236.

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In 1935 Moholy-Nagy emigrated to England. The same year he was joined in London by his friend Kepes, and the two started a design business specializing in commercial graphics and displays.15 But the extension of the evolutionary project of The New Vision from Moholy-Nagy to Kepes is not the only line we must follow, for as we enter Kepes’s archive, we discover that it has an archive of its own. In London, Kepes befriended James J. Crowther, the science editor for the Manchester Guardian, whom Kepes describes as a “mentor.” In 1937 Crowther published a popularization of modern physics, The Outline of the Universe, whose cover was designed by Kepes and Moholy-Nagy. Through Crowther Kepes came into contact with a number of important British scientists, including J. D. Bernal, Joseph Needham, Conrad Waddington, and J. B. S. Haldane.16 Another figure not mentioned by Kepes in his recollections of these years, but one with whom Moholy-Nagy had contact in London, was biologist Julian Huxley, patron of modern architecture at the London Zoo.17 Kepes, speaking into a tape recorder several decades later, recalls being struck by the concern these scientists had with annexing a social agenda to their specialized knowledge and scientific lives: Again . . . the reason I mention it is because I know that when I begin, confident that there is a task to find links between science and art, it was not my own sudden invention. There is a Greek proverb [that is] supposed to say that everybody has a father. It came from some of this contact with people who were doing, in a certain way, the same thing that I intended to do later, but less concentrated, because their own needs were different. As scientists they didn’t emphasize the art, though Waddington was emphasizing it.18 But this invocation of scientific fathers does not fully address the question of the scientific image that would so thoroughly condition Kepes’s discourse. The theories of the Gestalt school of perceptual psychology were also an important source for Kepes’s ideas during the 1940s on the organization of the visual field; these eventually led to

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the notion of “pattern-seeing” developed in The New Landscape, which sought to supersede a perceptual aesthetics based on the recognition of figural Gestalten.19 The work of the scientists Kepes met in London specifically addressed questions related to those he would explore in his own work, including the question of organization, through related means. Needham and Waddington were among the founding members of the Theoretical Biology Club, a group of leading organicist biologists that had begun meeting at Oxford in 1932.20 Among its other allegiances, including ties to general systems theory, this discourse also made use of concepts of pattern formation drawn from Gestalt psychology, since the problem of organization in the formation of unified, organic wholes was central to the organicist project.21 But more significantly, for these biologists the study of organizational processes in life at all scales was largely figured as a problem of visualization.22 Liquid crystals, railway switchyards, and undulating topographies were among the images they utilized to visualize specific biological processes. As Donna Haraway puts it in her study of the group: “All these gross analogies grew out of organismic biases; they were attempts to visualize wholeness so the abstraction could be translated into common, scientific, systematic understanding.”23 The affinity between such imagery and the photographs later exhibited by Kepes was confirmed when Kepes himself published illustrated texts by Conrad Waddington and Paul Weiss in the 1960s.24 But Kepes, whose first acknowledged exposure to science was to its images, and who would later claim these image-driven scientists as fathers, was not merely subordinating art here to the rigors of science. He was encountering an aporia implicit in the conjunction he would try so hard to effect between these two arenas, an aporia in which the authority of scientific knowledge is undone by the constitutive role played by aesthetic form in its visualization. Haraway, writing as a historian of science unproblematically utilizing aesthetic terms, resolves it by referring to these images as “metaphors.”25 This characterization will shortly be modified here with respect to Kepes, as we take into account the theoretical status accorded to the image in his own discourse. Soon after moving to Harvard in 1937, Gropius was asked to be the director of a new design school in Chicago inspired by the methods and teachings of the Bauhaus. He recommended Moholy-Nagy instead. The project was backed by a group of Chicago industrialists who told Moholy-Nagy that they wanted to establish a school of industrial design “along Bauhaus lines” but also “along practical and real lines.”26 Moholy-Nagy was hesitant but ultimately accepted the offer, and arrived in Chicago in the summer of 1937. Shortly thereafter he invited Kepes to join him to establish a “light workshop” at the school, which opened in October 1937 as the New Bauhaus. Kepes agreed, and emigrated to the United States in the early fall. But he was only one link in the network that was emerging. At the University of Chicago were a number of figures associated with the Unity of Science movement,

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which had developed out of Viennese logical positivism and was committed to formulating a common language enabling communication between the sciences. Among them was the philosopher of language Charles W. Morris, who taught a course called “Intellectual Integration” at the New Bauhaus. Morris believed that art, too, could contribute to this common language, and vice versa.27 He had begun to study relationships between sign systems and human behavior, dedicating himself to constructing a common ground on which specialists could communicate and integrate their knowledge into an organic totality.28 Not coincidentally, then, the New Bauhaus was itself premised on the notion of integration from the start. Its curriculum consisted of one year in preliminary courses and three years in workshops such as wood, metal, plastics, display, exhibition, and theater. Architecture was reserved for a two-year graduate course. This structure thus basically echoed that of the Bauhaus during the period when Moholy-Nagy taught there, except that where Gropius had described the Vorkurs as “Elementary Theory of Form; Experiments with Materials,” the New Bauhaus advertised three parallel preliminary courses as “Basic Design Workshop,” “Analytical and Constructive Drawing,” and “Scientific Subjects.” The last of these, supplemented by more advanced courses in “Nature Study,” “Comparative History of Art,” and “Science,” marked the inclusion in the curriculum of more traditionally academic courses than had been offered at the German Bauhaus. These courses were accompanied by an apology for the reputation of abstract formalism that had followed the Bauhaus from Europe: We have in the past given the function of art a formal importance, which segregates it from our daily existence, whereas art is always present where healthy and unaffected people live. Our task is, therefore, to contrive a new system of education which, along with specialized training in science and technique leads to a thorough awareness of fundamental human needs and a universal outlook. Thus, our concern is to develop a new type of designer, able to face all types of requirements, not because he is a prodigy but because he has the right method of approach. We wish to make him conscious of his own creative power, not afraid of new facts, working independently of recipes.29 This doctrine of “everyone is talented” had been present from the beginning in Moholy-Nagy’s pedagogy. Now, however, it was focused on the production of what he called a “new type of designer.” This projected designer was, in effect, a new social type, bearing a humanistic, universal outlook, an evolutionary adaptation capable of managing the reorganization of vision for the benefit of humanity as a whole.

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Measured against such an ambition, the actual influence of the New Bauhaus, its faculty and students, was negligible. Nevertheless, the school formed a key link in a network of discursive practices in which such questions are secondary. What matters more here are the lines of communication that passed through this point, which become visible on closer examination. One important guide for Moholy-Nagy’s attempts to redirect human evolution by inscribing a technologically mediated new vision was the so-called evolutionary humanism of the biologist Julian Huxley. Huxley, whom Moholy-Nagy had met in London in the mid-1930s, argued that humanist principles should be used as criteria in the scientific management of evolutionary development. He believed that human consciousness had evolved to the degree that it could now initiate a second order of evolutionary progress, in which the brutality of natural selection would be replaced by self-conscious, rationally managed population control. One practical consequence of this position was Huxley’s involvement with eugenics, which he (with his coauthor H. G. Wells) described in 1929 as “the preferential breeding of the best.”30 MoholyNagy thus found in Huxley’s ideas the theoretical framework for intervening in the evolution of vision. In Chicago, he adapted these ideas to a specific pedagogical context. Because culture could now be seen as a source of criteria for self-conscious evolutionary selection, there was no contradiction in introducing a humanistic element into the otherwise vocation-oriented Bauhaus curriculum devoted to the logic of the machine. Nevertheless, the brief life of the New Bauhaus still encapsulates the clichéridden conflict between the pragmatism of American industry and the utopianism of the European avant-gardes. Pressure was exerted on Moholy-Nagy to step down after the experimentalism of his approach became evident, and financial support was withdrawn after the school’s first year. Apparently, experimental visual research had succumbed to the demands of the marketplace. But these events may be more accurately interpreted as a realignment, in microcosm, of the Bauhaus project toward the model of the research laboratory—an image laboratory—with both industrial and academic affiliations. “This is not a school but a laboratory” were Moholy-Nagy’s first words in his opening address to students. This shift already prefigures the “laboratory” for the study of art and technology called the Center for Advanced Visual Studies that Kepes would found at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1967. In addition, it coincides with the beginnings of a realignment within American industry itself toward “pure” research not expected to yield immediate productive gain, a shift that would eventually underwrite what was called the “military-industrial-academic complex” of the mid-1960s, which we will encounter in chapter 6. It was premised on the same duality encountered but not engaged by Haraway in her study of organicist science, the duality between image as representation (or “metaphor”) and image as a machine that, like a microscope or an oscilloscope, adapts human vision to new modes of seeing.

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Following the closing of the New Bauhaus in 1938, Kepes continued to teach in an improvised setting, while rebuffing offers from the school’s sponsors to stay on in an institution restored under new leadership.31 Instead, again under Moholy-Nagy, he and others who had taught at the New Bauhaus reopened the school independently at another Chicago location in the winter of 1939, as the School of Design. Included in this group was Morris, who was joined at the new school by his University of Chicago colleagues Carl Eckhart and Ralph Gerard as unpaid faculty lecturing on their specialties. Gerard, who was a physiologist and member of the New Bauhaus faculty from the beginning, later played an important role in the dissemination of cybernetics and was a regular participant in the Macy cybernetics conferences. To find him here collaborating with Moholy-Nagy and Kepes to keep their enterprise afloat thus suggests not only the presence of a protocybernetic discourse in this transplanted Bauhaus from the start; it also implies the presence of a commitment to Bauhausrelated principles in the cybernetic discussions that were to come.32 In keeping with such affinities, Morris’s description of the rapprochement between art and science begun at the New Bauhaus was reprinted in the School of Design prospectus in abbreviated form, reinforcing the school’s continued orientation toward the academy.33 Along the same lines, in lieu of the board of directors representing the interests of industry that had been the source of conflict at the New Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy solicited what he called the “moral support” of a list of important academics and intellectuals: philosopher John Dewey, Gropius, Harvard dean Joseph Hudnut, Julian Huxley, publisher W. W. Norton, educator William Bacharach, and museum director Alfred H. Barr. In 1938, after the school’s inaugural year, W. W. Norton published a revised version of Moholy-Nagy’s The New Vision, now with the subtitle Fundamentals of Design, Painting, Sculpture, Architecture.34 A “virtual volume” produced by a rotating wire construction, executed in 1937, is among the illustrations of student work from the New Bauhaus that Moholy-Nagy added to this edition.35 The study and production of such effects at the School of Design, which in 1944 became the Institute of Design, is more fully documented in Moholy-Nagy’s last book, Vision in Motion, published posthumously in 1947. The book, an amalgam of his writings from the 1940s, is illustrated prolifically with work of New Bauhaus and Institute of Design students, as well as that of his own contemporaries, all placed in a theoretical framework that modifies significantly the propositions found in The New Vision. Mirroring the inclusion of humanistic courses at the New Bauhaus taught by University of Chicago faculty, the introduction self-consciously uses quotations in place of images to illustrate its arguments. The focus on “biological” necessity in The New Vision is converted to “sociobiological” necessity, accessible only through an education that combines the humanistic and technical spheres. “Art has two faces,” Moholy-Nagy writes, “the biological and the social, the one toward the individual and the other toward the group.”36

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2.5 Richard Koppe, “virtual volume,” ca. 1938. From László Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision: Fundamentals of Design, Painting, Sculpture, Architecture (rev. ed., 1938), 129. 2.6 László Moholy-Nagy, Space Modulator (bottom left, 1940) and its “virtual volume” (bottom right). From Vision in Motion (1947), 242–243.

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This new emphasis on the integration of the designer into society also contains an overtly primitivist component, reflected in Moholy-Nagy’s account of the disintegration of traditional societies into the disorganized modern marketplace.37 He does not interpret this as a reason to return to premodern forms of artistic expression, asserting instead that “tradition is man-made” and thus demands constant reassessment and refinement, like an industrially produced object. This is to say that the supposedly balanced state of nature represented by premodern cultures can be restored through human intervention, and Moholy-Nagy expects the new subspecies of designer to intervene in human evolution in favor of a stabilizing vision. The framework for such an intervention is again supplied by Huxley—now an advisor to the Institute of Design— whom Moholy-Nagy quotes at the outset of his first chapter: “There are many obvious ways in which the brain’s level of performance can be genetically raised—in acuteness of perception, memory, synthetic grasp and intuition, analytic capacity, mental energy, creative power, balance, and judgment.”38 This notion of human intervention in evolutionary processes is also what enables Moholy-Nagy to write that The biological and evolutionary progress of man was possible only through the development and constructive use of all his senses, hands, and brains, through his creative ability and intuition to master his surroundings; through his perceptive power, conceptual thought, and articulated emotional life. But concomitant with the stabilization of the industrial revolution these biological functions were suffocated under the tinsel of an easy-going life full of appliances and amenities, much too overestimated in their value. Man who is by nature able to express himself in different media allowed these most valuable biological potentialities to be amputated or paralyzed. It is an individual as well as social waste to have eyes and not see; ears and not hear; to destroy the endowment of instincts to create. The result is an atrophy of capabilities, a step-by-step deterioration. Man’s strong nature may endure for generations but the end is disintegration.39 Thus, for Moholy-Nagy, even as the evolutionary sequence of media leads to the emergence of a “new vision” among designers, industrial success brings with it suffocation under the superficialities of consumerism and fashion. He makes this critique explicit when he counterposes the sense of organic necessity embodied in D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s description of a swimming fur seal with the fashionable pouring of streamlined styling like “brown gravy in cheap restaurants” over all manner of

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static, industrially produced objects.40 Moholy-Nagy thus sought literally to evolve a humanistic visual faculty able to see through these illusions and replace them with what he argued was a biologically necessary “organic design.” The means of transmitting this vision were provided by Huxley’s revision of Darwinism to favor the intervention of science and culture in nature. This line of thought is developed through the rest of Vision in Motion, under chapter headings such as “New Method of Approach— Design for Life,” and “New Education—Organic Approach.” The emphasis is on the integration of media—“painting, photography, sculpture, space-time problems, motion pictures, literature, group poetry”41—into a communicative organicity for the benefit of the species.

Vision in Motion was dedicated to Elizabeth and Walter Paepcke, original supporters of the New Bauhaus who reemerged as sponsors and advocates of the School of Design. Beginning around 1934, the year in which the “Century of Progress” world’s fair in Chicago catalogued the streamlined design overtaking consumer objects, Walter Paepcke, the head of the Container Corporation of America, was urged by his wife to turn his attention to the way in which his company represented itself to the public. Closely connected with Chicago’s artistic circles and a collector of modern art, Elizabeth Paepcke suggested that he hire the designer Egbert Jacobson to set up an “art department” at the CCA and to produce a corporate image with a distinctly modern aesthetic. The result was a marketing campaign in which the packaging company repackaged itself by commissioning such artists as Herbert Bayer, A. M. Cassandre, Kepes, Willem de Kooning, Fernand Léger, and Herbert Matter to produce posters and other graphic works for the CCA, which were eventually exhibited in 1945 at the Art Institute of Chicago under the title Modern Art in Advertising.42 By that time, the Institute of Design had a board of directors under Paepcke that included executives from Marshall Field, United Airlines, Sears Roebuck, the Harris Bank, and the Chicago Association of Commerce. The selection underscored a commitment to make itself useful to industry in order to remain in existence, even as Moholy-Nagy continued to emphasize a broad, humanistic orientation. The school had survived the depressed economic conditions of the war by offering its services to the government, and immediately thereafter these gestures toward a wider public were converted into a renewed emphasis on design as a marketing tool.43 During this pe-

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riod, Kepes had been developing a curriculum in “visual design” at the school that would eventually be converted into a book of his own.44 The book, Language of Vision (1944), brought Kepes national recognition and became a required text in visual design curricula in architecture and design schools across the country. In Kepes’s Language of Vision, advertising takes the place previously accorded to architecture by Moholy-Nagy in The New Vision: it is both agent and product of a visual faculty adapted to the dynamism of modern life. Among the “visual fundamentals” with which Kepes concerns himself in the book is what he calls the “organization of optical belonging,” or the capacity of a visual unit or pattern of units to integrate itself into a larger field of similar patterns. Kepes illustrates this “law of visual organization” with an image of a snake with a patterned skin blending into the background of a bed of leaves: “a snake camouflaged by nature is not a snake.”45 In 1942 this same illustration accompanied an article in Civilian Defense magazine describing a course on camouflage taught at the School of Design by Kepes and Moholy-Nagy.46 The course began with the “basic problems of visual perception” that would allow the camoufleur to deceive the eye of the enemy. Here the “new vision”—already a vision in motion— was brought to bear on the subject, since “the aerial observer for whom camouflage has to be largely considered today is a mobile observer. Every factor involved in his vision is in continuous movement. His eye is moving, the light conditions are changing and the elements of the landscape are moving.”47 The finding and fixing of a target, isolated from its surroundings after the visual evaluation of tone, color, and texture, are formulated in terms of gestalt recognition strikingly similar to those used by Norbert Wiener in his efforts to track the movements of enemy pilots with his antiaircraft predictor. “This is the reason why at the beginning of camouflage teaching there is a basic investigation of point, line, tone, color, shape, etc.,” the course outline continues. Thus it is necessary to study figure-ground relationships, borders, shadows, reflections, and other properties identical to those studied by designers in the same school. In other words, the course was basic training in the Language of Vision. The other, more abstract diagrams illustrating the Civilian Defense article are of the same order as those illustrating the opening section of Language of Vision titled “Plastic Organization,” where Kepes defines his terms: The experience of a plastic image is a form evolved through a process of organization. The plastic image has all the characteristics of a living organism. It exists through forces in interaction which are acting in their respective fields, and are conditioned by these fields. It has an organic, spatial unity; that is, it is a whole the behavior of which is not determined by that of its individual

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2.7 Gyorgy Kepes, snake on patterned background. From Language of Vision (1944), 45. 2.8 Gyorgy Kepes, diagrams illustrating “spatial tension” and “dynamic equilibrium.” From Language of Vision (1944), 37.

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components, but where the parts are themselves determined by the intrinsic nature of the whole. It is, therefore, an enclosed system that reaches its dynamic unity by various levels of integration; by balance,rhythm and harmony.48 Here already we find a concise summary of the concepts that would condition Kepes’s work for the next two decades: the image as organism, formed through an organizing process in which the individual parts were determined by the dynamics of an encompassing, integrated “system.” The focus on the organization of the visual field throughout the book thus reflects more than simply pattern recognition for the sake of legibility, or (in the case of camouflage) the reverse. The opening lines of his introduction, written during the war, make clear what Kepes believes to be at stake here: “Today we experience chaos. The waste of human and material resources and the canalization of almost all creative effort into blind alleys bear witness to the fact that our common life has lost its coherency. In the focus of this eclipse of a healthy human existence is the individual, torn by the shattered fragments of his formless world, incapable of organizing his physical and psychological needs.”49 It is at this point that he invokes the “tragic formlessness” indicating failure in organizing the new “equipment” provided by science and technology into an “equilibrium” that, as we have already seen, resonates with Sigfried Giedion’s call for a “dynamic equilibrium” in the concluding chapter of Mechanization Takes Command, published four years later. Giedion’s preface to Kepes’s book does little more than interpolate Kepes into a “third generation” of practitioners of the “new spatial conception.” But Kepes was doing more than simply extending Giedion’s project, so closely tied up with MoholyNagy’s, into the realm of visual design. He was not mapping the contours of a new spatiality but rather was attempting to formulate the rules of a new language. According to Kepes, “the language of vision, optical communication, is one of the strongest potential means both to reunite man and his knowledge and to re-form man as an integrated being.” But even here there is the potential for confusion, since ultimately the key term in Kepes is not “language” but “communication,” and what appears to be a linguistic hypothesis turns out to be a theory of media. As Kepes puts it: Visual language can convey facts and ideas in a wider and deeper range than almost any other means of communication. It can reinforce the static verbal concept with the sensory vitality of dynamic imagery. It can interpret the new understanding of the physical world and social events because dynamic interrelationships and interpenetration, which are significant in every

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advanced scientific understanding of today, are intrinsic idioms of the contemporary vehicles of visual communication: photography, motion pictures, and television.50 The reappearance of the sequence of media laid out in Moholy-Nagy’s writings of the 1920s, with television taking the place of architecture at the end of the line, suggests that Kepes is far more interested in the structural effects of each medium than he is in the manifest content of the “message.” Or, again to paraphrase McLuhan (whom Kepes would later befriend and publish),51 the message being communicated by the language of vision lies in the properties of the media of optical communication themselves. This is where “organization” literally enters the picture. The “organized image” is not the carrier of a message; it is the message. Kepes argues, “To perceive a visual image implies the beholder’s participation in a process of organization. The experience of an image is thus a creative act of integration. Its essential characteristic is that by plastic power an experience is formed into an organic whole. Here is a basic discipline of forming, that is, thinking in terms of structure, a discipline of utmost importance in the chaos of our formless world.”52 For Kepes, then, organization is nothing more—or less—than a media effect. Nevertheless, the second section of Language of Vision, titled “Visual Representation,” would seem to return us to the problem of linguistic or semantic meaning, as Kepes takes the reader through an illustrated history of representational techniques. The same could be said of the last section of the book, “Toward a dynamic iconography,” whose subsections include “Laws of organization of meaningful visual signs” and “Disintegration of the fixed system of meaning organization.” Indeed, the book does systematically seek to restore a manifest content, or a “general semantics,” to modernist abstraction, a project reinforced by its introduction—written by S. I. Hayakawa, founder of the General Semantics movement, which was dedicated to extending the analysis of linguistic meaning into all realms of human endeavor, including science.53 Here also, McLuhan’s guidebook to reading advertisements, The Mechanical Bride, which appeared several years later (after his encounter with Giedion), is relevant to decoding a “dynamic iconography.” But the most significant figure for such a decoding is Charles Morris, who read and commented on Kepes’s manuscript during its preparation. Two years after the appearance of Kepes’s book, Morris published Signs, Language, and Behavior. In it, he sought to develop what he called a “science of signs” reflecting the “biological basis” of a “science of behavior,” citing the behavioral psychology of Clark L. Hull on the stimulus-response structure of what Morris refers to as “sign-behavior.”54 Significantly for the history of the organizational complex, it was

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during this same period that Norbert Wiener also began speculating on relations between input-output feedback loops and the stimulus-response circuits of behaviorism.55 Morris would later note the subsequent assimilation of the terminology of information theory into semiotics by referring to the distinction between “information” and “meaning” made by Claude Shannon, a distinction that was also maintained by Wiener.56 For Morris, semiotics and the study of “sign-behavior” were concerned with the content and interpretation of signs: in other words, with signification. “Information,” in contrast, was required to possess no meaning, only an organization. This is also what Wiener meant when he referred to “organization as message” in The Human Use of Human Beings (which appeared after Language of Vision, and thus cannot be counted among its subtexts). Both of these notions are present in Kepes’s book: the organizational “message” of abstract visual patterns and the semantic instrumentality accorded to visual signs by Morris. The duality is resolved in the purported capacity of both forms of message to regulate human behavior and thus, for Kepes, to restore order to a world out of control. In the sense of both pattern and sign, organization as an agent of social equilibrium is the message of Language of Vision. It is what is being advertised on every page of the book. In fact, the book nears its conclusion with a series of advertisements designed by Kepes and others, many of which were commissioned by the Container Corporation of America under Walter Paepcke. Four years earlier, in 1940, Kepes published a small pamphlet on his graphic design work that included some of these same images. At that time he was already at work on Language of Vision, whose working title—“The Anatomy of the Created Image”—clearly announced the book’s optical organicism. In a brief text included in the pamphlet, “The Task of Visual Advertising,” Kepes identifies spatial experience as the theoretical basis for advertising design.57 Taking a cue from The New Vision, this experience is described as one of mobility and speed, with graphic elements (such as advertisements) acting as “traffic signs” guiding the consumer through “this mobile landscape of our environment.” Thus while Moholy-Nagy concluded the sequence of media in The New Vision with an image of a protocinematic new architecture, Kepes concludes his own extension (and revision) of that project with advertisements intended to regulate the flows of a consumerist landscape—a second nature given over to what he calls the “eye of the customer.” Kepes completed Language of Vision after having left the School of Design in 1943, while he was teaching courses on visual fundamentals at North Texas State College and subsequently at Brooklyn College in New York. The book drew immediate attention upon its release, and in 1945 he accepted a full-time appointment as associate professor in the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.58

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Kepes taught four courses during his early years at MIT: “Visual Fundamentals,” “Light and Color,” “Graphic Presentation,” and “Painting”; the first two were of greatest consequence in the development of his discourse. Here it may seem that we are witnessing nothing more than the ongoing assimilation of Bauhaus pedagogy in the American context.59 But the difference was significant. As Kepes put it in a 1948 letter to Moholy-Nagy’s second wife, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy: As far as I can generalize, the difference[s] between my approach and that of the old Bauhaus lie in that the Bauhaus emphasized the exploration of new materials, techniques and sensory fields such as the tactile, which was mainly a process of opening up the horizon; whereas I was more interested in organizing these new findings, and put the emphasis, as in my book, on the meaning of order in visual experience in its present social context. My approach implied that all exercises introduced in the light and color workshop and in visual fundamentals had their focal points not only in the extensions of the range of visual sensibilities, but also in acquainting the students with the structural laws of plastic experiences. I always tried to refer these structural laws back to their social meaning.60

2.9 Gyorgy Kepes, advertisement for the Container Corporation of America, 1938. From Language of Vision (1944), 181.

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In this way, Kepes sought to absorb Bauhaus fundamentals such as point, line, plane, and texture into a homeostatic organizational matrix seeking dynamic equilibrium. For him, the organized—and thus organic—image was the correlate and catalyst of an organized—and thus organic—society. This was the message he brought to architects during the mid-1940s. In March 1947, for example, Kepes participated in a conference on “planning man’s physical environment,” which was held as part of Princeton University’s bicentennial celebration.61 Here he explicitly referred to a “second nature” of commodities in which “images take forms—forms cheat functions—functions are robbed of their natural sources—human needs.”62 For Kepes speaking to architects and planners at Princeton, organism, environment, and “plastic truth” are to be integrated by a retrained visual faculty focused on order and structural unity. In this way, the debased “second nature” of the physical environment would be restored to a “true nature” with new imagery—what he called “a new symbolic form of basic human values.”63 Another contribution to the conference that even more literally addressed retraining the vision of architects and planners was a series of demonstrations of visual phenomena by the perceptual psychologist Adelbert Ames. Ames and Giedion were on the same panel, and Giedion’s impressions of Ames’s demonstrations were published three years later in the inaugural issue of the interdisciplinary review Trans/formation. These were accompanied by Alfred Barr’s report to a committee at the Museum of Modern Art on his visit to the Hanover Institute (formerly the Dartmouth Eye Institute), where Ames was conducting his research. At Princeton, Ames had suspended a series of sticks in space in such a way that when viewed from a particular vantage point they assembled into a recognizable figure, a chair. The effect was, in Giedion’s words, the recognition that “[w]hat the ‘eye perceives’ can be a chair, but it may also turn out that this chair is nothing but a few sticks hovering in mid-air.”64 The significance attributed by Ames to his studies is symmetrical with Kepes’s efforts to unify the aesthetic, scientific, and social realms.65 One month after attending the Princeton conference, Kepes received from Ames information on the research on which these demonstrations were based.66 Among the documents sent was “Integration of Recent Developments and Hypotheses in the Sciences of Physics, Biology, and Psychology,” a paper in which Ames and his colleagues attempted to theorize their observations on the contingency of vision in relation to the physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s landmark effort to integrate the findings of modern biology with those of modern physics, specifically around the question of the production and maintenance of order or, in biological terms, organization.67 With the addition of Giedion (with his allusions to modern physics), Kepes (with his connections to theoretical biology), and even the Museum of Modern Art to this nexus of discursive relations, we can see how the project of integrating art and science belonged to a larger

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attempt to integrate diverse forms of knowledge and thereby treat the totality of human experience as a single sociobiological system.

In the late 1940s Kepes compiled a substantial list of texts on different aspects of the synthesis he was attempting to effect. These working bibliographies offer a glimpse of the archive that conditioned both his teaching and his writing. Louis Sullivan’s Kindergarten Chats (1947) is listed alongside a Cambridge report on the physiology of vision, Sergei Eisenstein’s Film Sense (1942), and E. M. Stephenson’s Animal Camouflage (1946). Matila Ghyka’s Geometry of Art and Life (1946) is followed by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form (rev. ed., 1942) and Herbert Read’s Education through Art (1943). Kepes’s command of German allowed him to list Erwin Panofsky’s “Die Perspektive als ‘Symbolische Form’” (1927) alongside John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934) and Gottfried Semper’s Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten; oder, Praktische Aesthetik (2nd ed., 1878). Ames’s “Depth in Pictorial Art” (1925) follows a series of “biological references” that include Joseph Needham’s Order and Life (1936), Conrad Waddington’s Organisms and Genes (1940), and Paul Weiss’s Principles of Development (1939), whose authors were mentioned above in the context of image and scientific paradigm. Finally, among the other texts listed are The Organism (1939), by the biologist Kurt Goldstein; The Growth of the Mind (1928), by the Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka; A Dynamic Theory of Personality (1935), by the psychologist Kurt Lewin; Raumaesthetik und geometrisch-optische Tauschungen (1897), by the empathy theorist Theodor Lipps; and the statement on the activities of the Dartmouth Eye Institute supplied by Ames.68 On its own this list may seem eclectic, but its coherence derives from Kepes’s solicitation of an organizational imperative from a diverse range of discourses. To a greater or lesser extent they are linked by the affinities he identifies between scientific and psychological research and theories of aesthetic experience that seek, in different ways, to overcome the alienation between observer and object. As he developed his own discourse, Kepes collected quotations and notes from sources that referred to the overall problematics he had set in motion in Language of Vision and would elaborate in his later work. For example, such formulations as “visual art is a good seismograph of cultural feedback” indicate his awareness of cybernetic thought. This is made explicit in a page of notes on Wiener’s Cybernetics, in which, as we saw earlier, “control” is

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designated as a central category of a new technological epoch. Wiener’s words were copied and underlined by Kepes as follows: “If in the XVIIth century and early XVIII century are the age of clocks, and the later XVIII and XIX centuries constitute the age of steam-engines the present time is the age of communication and control.”69 This citation makes clear that quite early on—at the latest, by the early 1950s— Kepes recognized and identified himself with the conditions that underlay the organizational complex. He attempted to make scientific analyses, and especially theories of biological self-regulation (he also refers to Cannon’s Wisdom of the Body, with its articulation of homeostatic processes), the basis for an aesthetic project. As he puts it to himself elsewhere in his notes, “The importance of pattern increases with the complexity of the things, from simple nuclei, electrons, mesons, crystals—enzymes + hormones, organs, man’s body → social unity. In art form the pattern is a common pattern, from the physical arrangement—to the psychological, emotive, perceptual configuration—here is one common patterning.”70 This notion of the common pattern as a means of aesthetico-social regulation (or control) would reemerge several years later as the central thesis of Kepes’s The New Landscape of Art and Science (1956), in which appeared Wiener’s text “Pure Patterns in a Natural World.” In early 1951, Kepes installed The New Landscape, an exhibition of scientific photography, in the Hayden Gallery at MIT. These images were among those he collected for the forthcoming book, in which he compared the patterns made visible by science to the organizational matrices of modern art and modern architecture. In the exhibition, the synthetic agenda emerging out of Kepes’s reading of science was expressed not only in what the brochure called the “delicate architecture” revealed in these images but also in the status accorded to this architecture within the project of reorganizing and integrating aesthetic experience and scientific knowledge: “This rich new material of the world is often buried in the research laboratories of the different specialists and seen only with the specialist’s eye. Here brought into common focus visual features which were formerly too fast or too slow, too large or too small, too dense, too scattered, otherwise concealed from our eyes, could evoke an awareness of the values inherent in the expanding world of knowledge and vision.”71 Thus had the “new vision” opened onto a “new landscape” of images coming out of the research laboratories of the military-industrial complex, where the alienation of the scientific specialist was to be overcome by the retrained eye of the artist. In order to sustain this effect, the media through which images were transmitted had to be naturalized. It was as though these miraculously organized patterns, the products of the same scientific artifice that had brought about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were the very materialization of the organic image Kepes had sought in Language of Vision. Thus, on 16 July 1945 fifty cameras recorded the first atomic explosion at Alamogordo, New Mexico. And it was Harold Edgerton, whose stroboscopic photograph

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of a golfer’s swing Giedion had compared to the kinesthetics of Rockefeller Center in Space,Time and Architecture—versions of which were also reproduced by Kepes in Language of Vision and Moholy-Nagy in Vision in Motion—who would photograph the first test of a hydrogen bomb on Eniwetok Atoll while flying in an airplane over the Pacific Ocean on 1 November 1952.72 The chronophotography of the physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey, as it was absorbed into the techniques of scientific management practiced by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth in the factories of the early twentieth century, forms a basis for Giedion’s own conjunction of modes of visualization—both aesthetic and technical—with the effects of mechanization. In a section that reveals the poignantly allegorical nature of Mechanization Takes Command, Giedion says of the slaughterhouses he visited in the United States that given the resistance of organic bodies to the geometric regularity of mechanical processes, “Killing itself then cannot be mechanized. It is upon organization that the burden falls.” In the gas chambers, and by extension with atomic weaponry, “organization” thus replaces “mechanization” in Giedion’s terminology. According to Giedion, the efficiency and rapidity of this carefully monitored and controlled process, in which death cries and the whirring of gears cannot be distinguished, also induces a certain numbness, or “neutrality”: “One does not experience,

2.10 (previous page) Gyorgy Kepes, The New Landscape exhibition, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1951. From The New Landscape in Art and Science (1956), 101. 2.11 Harold Edgerton, Golfer Multiflash, n.d. From Gyorgy Kepes, Language of Vision (1944), 182. 2.12 Harold E. Edgerton, K. J. Germeshausen, and H. E. Grier, hydrogen bomb explosion photographed from an airplane, Elugelab,Eniwetok Atoll,Marshall Islands,1 November 1952.

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one does not feel, one merely observes.” And to make clear his ultimate reference, he concludes the section: “This neutrality toward death may be lodged deep in the roots of our time. It did not bare itself on a large scale until the War, when whole populations, as defenseless as the animals hooked head downwards on the traveling chain, were obliterated with trained neutrality.”73 Giedion’s reference above is largely to managerial and bureaucratic forms of organization that were developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to implement and regulate Taylorist and Fordist production processes, whose most prominent analyst was Max Weber. But by 1951, three years after the appearance of his friend’s book, Kepes had already passed this discourse through the lens of theoretical biology, cybernetics, and a semiotics of communication. It was not mechanization but organization that had taken command—or more to the point, taken control. This takeover was recorded in the new landscape exhibited by Kepes at MIT. It was also recorded in the command and control centers of the military-industrial complex that produced and photographed the hydrogen bomb and, half a decade later, put in place networked, servomechanical systems like SAGE to regulate its effects. The utopianism of Kepes’s project of integrating art and science through new modes of visualization is thus always already discolored by its own elision of the a priori collaborations practiced by photographers like his MIT colleague Edgerton. In order to extract a benevolent organicity out of such collaborations, Kepes had to suppress the organized dystopias presented with “trained neutrality” by the eye of the camera, to which even Giedion alluded. He therefore appealed to the organizational pattern as a means of overcoming the formlessness of a subjectivity exposed to the conditions of the cold war, a subjectivity whose inner dissolution had already been figured by Herbert Matter—whose work also appears in both Vision in Motion and Language of Vision—in a photomontage of an atomic explosion occurring inside the mind of a human silhouette that was featured on the cover of Arts and Architecture in December 1946. Such inner and outer formlessness was only visible to the camera momentarily, as the mushroom cloud of the hydrogen bomb dissolved into an invisible and unphotographable cloud of radioactive fallout that systematically eliminated all life. This too was a new landscape, the entropic emptiness of what was left after Eniwetok—a dead nature whose reenchantment could be registered only as ideology in pictures. In the summer of 1951 Giedion, who was vacationing in the Mediterranean, sent a postcard to Kepes indicating that he was unsure what to write about Kepes’s images and mentioning as an aside that he was planning to meet Lancelot Law Whyte, “author of Growth + Form,” the following day.74 Gropius, too, apologized for not having sent his own contribution as promised and expressed a similar anxiety, writing that “[i]n order to bring myself in the right spirit, I read Lancelot Whyte’s book ‘Analysis of

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Form,’ which I suppose you know as it is so very close to your own. The result was that I felt even less able to venture into an approach of my own, as I found some of my ideas already most ably expressed in that book.”75 The actual title of Whyte’s book, misread by both Giedion and Gropius, was Aspects of Form, a collection of essays that had grown out of a conference held on the occasion of the exhibition Growth and Form at London’s Institute for Contemporary Art in 1951; it was inspired by D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form, which had been revised and reissued in 1942.76 Among those scientists contributing to the book were Joseph Needham and Conrad Waddington, the two members of the Theoretical Biology Club whom Kepes had met in London in the 1930s. In this way, those scientists whose ideas had contributed to Kepes’s formation of an aesthetic project of organic integration were now getting together, in response to further aesthetic initiatives, to pursue what Whyte recognized in retrospect as a shift “from the discovery of new fundamental laws to the progressive identification of natural structures [or patterns].”77 Art and science had effectively switched places in this feedback loop. Where Kepes sought an aesthetic response to science, here at the same time was science—the very same science of organicist biology—attempting to respond to the morphogenetic will of art. Located, then, near the end of the trajectory we have been following is The New Landscape in Art and Science, published by Kepes in 1956. Confronted with the book’s own archive, described above, we are tempted to read it as the complement to Aspects

2.13 Herbert Matter, cover of Arts and Architecture 63 (December 1946).

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of Form: a conclusive synthesis of aesthetic and scientific knowledge, or a depiction of a reorganized nature mapped from an aesthetic point of view, as implied by its title. But Kepes himself warns that this is a book of “allusions and not conclusions.” He even goes so far as to declare in the opening line of his preface: “This book is meant to be looked at more than read.”78 Looking at the book, we are overcome by a sense of exhaustion. The pieces eventually contributed by Giedion and Gropius are relatively benign restatements of the homeostatic project. Richard Neutra’s essay, as we have already seen in the preceding chapter, ecstatically affiliates itself with Kepes’s mission of uniting microcosm and macrocosm, “inner” and “outer,” through a quasi-cybernetic collapse of architecture into neurophysiology. And, as we have already noted, Kepes had sought to make Wiener’s contribution a centerpiece but had to settle instead for his own presentation of cybernetic material. Also included in the volume are essays by the former New Bauhaus faculty members Ralph Gerard (“Design and Function in the Living”) and Charles Morris (“Man-Cosmos Symbols”) as well as by the biologist C. F. A. Pantin (“Organic Design”) and the crystallographer Kathleen Lonsdale (“Art in Crystallography”). Among others, Karl Deutsch, Wiener’s friend and collaborator and Kepes’s MIT colleague, is thanked for his advice on the project. Kepes’s own texts repeat, in a variety of terms, the exhausted call for the restoration of equilibrium.79 The sense of exhaustion permeating the book’s words is exacerbated by its profuse imagery. The bulk of these images are collected in a central section devoted to the New Landscape exhibition, in which natural patterns are compared with the formal structure of modern and classical artworks. Technical photographs acquired from a variety of scientific laboratories are arranged in four categories: “Magnification of Optical Data,” “Expansion and Compression of Events in Time,” “Expansion of the Eye’s Sensitivity Range,” and “Modulation of Signals.” Each attempts to illustrate the commonality of naturally occurring organizational patterns, according (respectively) to temporal, spatial, physiological, and informatic continuities. But despite this effort to demonstrate continuities of pattern at all scales and across all modes of visual reception, the overall effect is much more like the proliferation of advertising images that Marshall McLuhan described as a “whirling phantasmagoria.” Indeed McLuhan had already written in 1951 (the same year Kepes first exhibited these images) that the advertisements collected in The Mechanical Bride are “unfolded by exhibit and commentary as a single landscape.”80 But where he designated these images “the folklore of industrial man,” we must insist that the scientific images collected by Kepes belong to another kind of “folklore,” albeit one that converges on that of the “global village” later projected by McLuhan in its dependence on cybernetic principles. If the afterimages of the atomic blast register a world out of control, then the scientific images collected by Kepes are corrective patterns fed into the visual conscious-

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ness of architects (like those he taught at MIT), among others. They are, in that sense, an organizational software written in the patterned code of the images. As an extension of Kepes’s efforts in Language of Vision to generate a “dynamic iconography,” the folkloric function of these scientific patterns is thus necessarily derived from their supposed organicity: software as myth. Therefore, it matters little whether we read the captions provided by Kepes to identify each image, or even the extended captions that constitute the book’s text. Ultimately, these will only send us back to the images, since what holds everything together is their operative logic: science has unleashed technological, cognitive, and social processes that have spun out of control even as it has produced new images capable of regulating its own informatic degeneration; art

2.14 Snail’s tongue. From section on “magnification of optical data” in Gyorgy Kepes, The New Landscape in Art and Science (1956), 115.

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2.15 Cathode-ray oscilloscope patterns. From section on “modulation of signals” in Gyorgy Kepes, The New Landscape in Art and Science (1956), 179.

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will integrate these organizational patterns into a new vision,a “pattern-seeing” that will set the guided missile of the organizational complex back on course. Architecture itself appears in many forms in The New Landscape in Art and Science. One image presents one of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes; another compares one of his tensegrity structures with a drawing of the microorganism polystyrola. There is a photograph of a Pier Luigi Nervi roof shell. A drawing of another roof shell by Eduardo Catalano is compared with a chair by Charles and Ray Eames, and with the domed Kresge Auditorium at MIT designed by Eero Saarinen. The modular components of Eames chairs are juxtaposed with the magnetic core memory of an MIT computer. Le Corbusier’s roof terrace at Marseilles and, earlier, his Modulor figure appear alongside the golden section monument designed in Milan by Banfi, Belgiojoso, Peressutti & Rogers (BBPR) and opposite Francesco di Giorgio’s study of human proportion, respectively. A Paul Rudolph house is set beside a Conrad Wachsman space frame study. But these are not, like the final image of “Architecture” in Moholy-Nagy’s The New Vision, presented as the culmination of an evolutionary process as it passes through different media. In the new landscape, architecture becomes one among many interchangeable media, all of which receive and transmit organizational patterns.81

2.16 Radiographs. Clockwise from left: ant, zinc in tomato fruit, grasshopper spermatocyte, crab nebula, crab nebula. From section on “expansion of the eye’s sensitivity range” in Gyorgy Kepes, The New Landscape in Art and Science (1956), 168–169.

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2.17 Polystyrola, drawing by Hans Haffenrichter (above); and R. Buckminster Fuller, “Model Discontinuous Compression Structuring.” Page from Gyorgy Kepes, The New Landscape in Art and Science (1956), 354.

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2.18 Clockwise from lower left: Digital Computer Laboratory, MIT, magnetic core memory; Charles and Ray Eames, standard chair components; experimental ceiling lighting; student project, modular paper construction; Dorothy Pelzer, acoustic ceiling (project). Page from Gyorgy Kepes, The New Landscape in Art and Science (1956), 335.

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In 1956, the same year the book was published, Kepes began convening a number of interdisciplinary seminars that became the basis for the seven-volume Vision + Value series he edited for the publisher George Braziller in the 1960s.82 In 1960 he also acted as a guest editor for a special issue of the humanistic review Daedalus, titled The Visual Arts Today. Here again we find scientists like the theoretical biologist Paul Weiss writing about organic morphogenesis alongside Le Corbusier on architecture and the arts. But again the direct projection of these ideas onto architecture met with a certain resistance, perhaps best expressed by Kepes’s friend Marcel Breuer, when he wrote privately of his reservations about ideas in Daedalus that he found at times “moody, confused and confusing.”83 These comments should not be mistaken for an architect’s disavowal of Kepes’s project. Rather, they can be seen in context as expressing something akin to the sense of exhaustion brought on by The New Landscape. What Breuer most likely recognized was that the Visual Arts Today issue was less a survey of the contemporary aesthetic landscape than a melancholic repetition, a lament. As he repeatedly decried the disorganized phantasmagoria of postwar experience during these years, Kepes’s own rhetoric became increasingly taut. He spoke to an audience at the Cooper Union in 1958 about the “lonely crowd in the wasteland” and about the subjects addressed by abstract expressionism, who occupied a postapocalyptic metropolis, which Kepes described as a “bleak, cruel, faithless environment” that was alternately “centerless, bodiless, limitless,” “structureless,” and “shapeless, contourless.”84 Yet, visible in the overwhelming cascade of images flowing through The New Landscape is the same emptied-out environment in whose physiognomy Kepes could see only what he took to be the cruelty of formlessness, of the bleakly entropic disintegration of the radiant organisms projected by his modernist predecessors. Among the latter can be counted Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building (completed in 1957), to which Kepes was quite likely referring in his introduction to the Daedalus issue: A beautiful crystalline structure in America’s greatest city (itself a symbol of the finest thinking in contemporary architecture and at the same time, like the torre of medieval Tuscany, a boastful symbol of wealth and power) displays, in surroundings that state an absolute control of contemporary materials and techniques and a perfect mastery of the new beauty of architectural space, images of the torn and broken man. In its offices and corridors are paintings and sculptures shaped with idioms in tune with the twilight spirit that created them: surfaces that are moldy, broken, corroded, ragged, dripping; brush strokes executed with the sloppy brutality of cornered men.85

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While these lines clearly register Kepes’s opposition to what he took to be abstract expressionism’s retreat into interiority (the target of his Daedalus project), they also demonstrate the blindness of the new vision he promoted to the structural emptiness of its own methods for exerting “absolute control.” For if the much-remarked “silence” of Mies’s building resembles anything in Kepes’s project, it resembles the silent awe with which the “message” of the newly organized landscape is communicated.86 In other words, for the cybernetically oriented Kepes, silence was organization itself: the absence of noise. Like the images in his book, many of which share the “crystalline” beauty he sees in Mies (including the image of crystal growth he described as “a space-time boundary of energies in organization”), Seagram’s grids and those of its less distinguished neighbors operate as organized patterns—that is, as organisms. But their empty surfaces reflect a photographically enchanted vision back outward, revealing only a desperate desire for plenitude, an overdetermined longing for the organicity of silent communication. In The New Landscape, Kepes insists that “it is important to organisms and social complexes that they should be able to live—and not only to live but to flourish, to realize their potentialities, to retain cohesiveness at each successive stage and, at the same time, to grow and move without frustration. For this, the inner and outer forces must be commensurate, resulting in a harmonious unity rather than in a wild oscillation about a never attained point of equilibrium.”87 In strict compliance with the imperatives of the organizational complex, Kepes extended this desire for the “harmonious unity” of inside and outside into a feedbackdriven project of self-correction whose guiding principle was the suppression of noise. His “pattern-seeing” was commensurate with the logic of the new machines and the corporations that managed them. As Marshall McLuhan would put it several years later, “Now, in the electronic age, data classification yields to pattern recognition, the key phrase at IBM.”88 But Kepes’s project was always already exhausted by its own circularity, since to learn to see these patterns was to enter into an aesthetics in which everything is connected to everything else. Behind each pattern was only another pattern, and behind each network another network—all collapsed together into an infinitely extensive loop spiraling up and down in scale, like the arc of a guided missile turning in on itself, and out again.

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In his working notes that led up to the publication of The New Landscape in Art and Science, Gyorgy Kepes declares that “[e]very feature of the man created environment has [an] inherent physiognomy [and] thus is an object of communication.”1 The contributions to that book by Norbert Wiener on mathematical patterns and by the physiologist Ralph Gerard on the functionality of organized systems are followed by a text by the psychologist Heinz Werner, “On Physiognomic Perception.” Werner notes recent psychological interest in the contingency of vision as he declares his interest in accounting psychologically for “aesthetic behavior” by distinguishing between two modes of perception: the “geometric-technical” vision of science, and the affective, empathic, “physiognomic” vision of art.2 This distinction, and the attendant project of restoring to rationalized postwar experience the dimension of affective physiognomics,

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belongs entirely within the larger project of mediating science with art through images as articulated by Kepes. But it also opens a window onto parallel efforts unfolding within the ruthlessly “scientific” realm of corporate architecture. In the June 1957 issue of Progressive Architecture, an issue devoted entirely to high-rise office buildings, there appeared a reprint of “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered” by Louis Sullivan. Sullivan’s article, first published in 1896, adumbrates an aesthetic logic for the office building based on a direct reflection of the pragmatic prerequisites of its spaces. In reprinting the article, the editors of Progressive Architecture were attempting to provide a context for their observation that “the high-rise office building of the 1950s is the best known symbol of U.S. architecture today.”3 And like many similar presentations of the commercial architecture of the period in professional journals, the Progressive Architecture survey resembles nothing more than a manual of technical specifications. Works such as the Socony Mobil and Alcoa buildings by Harrison & Abramowitz; the Inland Steel Building in Chicago by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill; speculative office buildings designed by large commercial firms such as Kahn & Jacobs and Emery Roth & Sons on New York’s Park Avenue; and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building approaching completion nearby are shown side by side in a standardized format accompanied by vital statistics, inviting a comparison of objects in terms of their pragmatic responses to a set of technical problems. Coupled with articles on the economics of high-rise real estate, techniques of curtain wall construction, and the foreseeable effects of automation on the workplace, this comparative anatomy affords a partial glimpse of what had become, by the mid1950s, the science of the office. Such comparisons also tend to suppress qualitative distinctions between buildings, in favor of a general equivalence against which quantitative distinctions can be measured. In that sense, the status as a singular artwork generally attributed to Mies’s Seagram Building, for example (as distinct from its many “copies”), is rendered obsolete by the very idea of the curtain wall as a generalized technological system. More than simply offering mechanical reproductions of interchangeable, reified commodities against which Seagram stands in refined “silence,” such documents as the Progressive Architecture survey offer the very image of systematicity, inclusiveness, and flexibility within which Seagram appears as merely one module among many. In such a context, Sullivan’s effort to consider the tall office building from an “artistic” point of view seems, at first glance, out of place. Except, that is, to the extent that the aesthetics of “form follows function” advocated there by Sullivan had its own roots in a scientific discourse from an earlier period. It is well known that Sullivan borrowed the slogan—which he uses twice in the article—from the “Yankee stonecutter,” the neoclassical sculptor Horatio Greenough.4 Greenough, in turn, was a reader of the biological treatises of Georges Cuvier and his contemporaries, from whom he

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translated the notion of the organic integration of functional components into the presentation of logical—if classical—form stripped bare in art. When Greenough argued, in an 1852 essay called “Structure and Organization” (reprinted in the collection Form and Function [1947]), that in utilitaritan structures such as ships, bridges, and fortifications “we have been emancipated from authority by the stern organic requirements of the works,” he was making above all a claim for the transparency of aesthetic form to scientific principles to which the artist or architect had no choice but to surrender. Foremost among these principles was the “unflinching adaptation [in nature] of forms to function.”5 In other words, for the artist Greenough and for Sullivan after him, “form follows function” was above all an aesthetic principle, not a technical one. A building’s organization would, in effect, emerge spontaneously out of the new “nature” of the marketplace as represented by the client and his requirements, and the architect’s job was to see that the results were faithfully expressed in material form—physiognomically, that is. In describing his hypothetical ideal office building, Sullivan constructs what is primarily an image of organic cellularity: “we take our cue from the individual cell,

3.1 Kahn & Jacobs, 425 Park Avenue, New York; and Emery Roth & Sons, Colgate Palmolive Building, New York. From “High Rise Office Buildings,” Progressive Architecture 38, no. 6 (June 1957).

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which requires a window with its separating pier, its sill and lintel, and we, without more ado, make them look all alike because they are all alike.”6 But as Colin Rowe reminded his readers the same year (1956) that Kepes published The New Landscape in Art and Science, according to one of Sullivan’s European contemporaries, the attitude expressed here pointedly confirmed that Sullivan and his fellow Chicago architects had “frankly accepted the conditions imposed by the speculator.”7 Rowe argued that the dynamic spatial potential of the “Chicago frame” was overlooked in Chicago precisely because “space” was already given, in the form of the real estate developed speculatively in the works of William Le Baron Jenney, Daniel Burnham, Sullivan, and others. It was thus left to the likes of Mies, Le Corbusier, and Sullivan’s pupil Frank Lloyd Wright to liberate space as an expressive medium, but at the expense of the workaday pragmatism characteristic of fin de siècle Chicago. Comparing Victor Horta’s critical project in the Maison du Peuple (1897) with the commercialism of Holabird and Root’s McLurg Building (1900), Rowe declares: “In Belgium, it is evident, the art nouveau was one of those revolutionary movements essentially developed on a highly developed program; but in Chicago, it should be clear that the structural revolution was largely without any such theoretical support.”8 In fact, the project of aesthetic transparency to organizational imperatives driven by market forces was theorized from the start, albeit not in a form accessible to Rowe. Passing as it did from scientific thought into aesthetic discourse, the notion of the organic integration of functional components was reconverted into the theoretical basis of an “organic” architecture, the architecture of the “tall office building artistically considered.” For Rowe, whose point of departure was the preeminence achieved by the structural frame as an organizational matrix for modern architecture, comparisons between the skyscrapers of Mies van der Rohe and those of Emery Roth & Sons would no doubt have obscured his closely argued distinction between those architects who had “frankly accepted the conditions imposed by the speculator” and those of the avant-garde who had supposedly arisen in protest—Mies’s work in the 1940s for the Chicago developer Herbert S. Greenwald notwithstanding. The question of Mies’s, and Wright’s, descent (and distance) from the likes of Sullivan is central for Rowe, who is at pains to distinguish between “architecture” and “equipment,” or between discursive and nondiscursive production. Progressive Architecture, on the other hand, implied that the commercial skyscrapers of the postwar period were subject to the same rules as were the “tall office buildings” of Chicago, whether they were designed by architects like Mies or by architects like Emery Roth & Sons. For Rowe, and for many who have followed him, it was a matter of distinguishing sharply between the architects of the avant-garde and their commercial colleagues, whether in the 1890s or the 1950s. This distinction was also implicit in Rowe’s interpretation (also in 1956–1957), of recent works by Mies and his contemporaries (including Eero Saarinen) as evidence of a neoPalladian, classicist rejection of vanguardist ideology, including modern architecture’s

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claims to historical necessity.9 But a refusal to accept such distinctions leads us to a modified genealogy of the postwar office, and in particular to the curtain wall.

To take up this genealogy, we must return briefly to Chicago— but now to the Chicago of 1922, the date of the international design competition sponsored by the Chicago Tribune for its new headquarters, to be located on Michigan Avenue north of the city’s commercial center. Sullivan’s assessment of the results of the competition, which was won by the team of John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood, celebrated the second-place entry by the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen: Qualifying as it does in every technical regard, and conforming to the mandatory items of the official program of instructions, it goes freely in advance, and, with the steel frame as a thesis, displays a high science of design such as the world up to this day had neither known nor surmised. In its single solidarity of concentrated intention, there is revealed a logic of a new order, the logic of living things, and this inexorable logic of life is most graciously accepted and set forth in fluency of form.10 Sullivan may have recognized certain affinities between Saarinen’s project and the modeled, emphatically vertical facades of his own Guaranty Building (1892) and Wainwright Building (1895). Moreover, as Manfredo Tafuri has suggested, he may also have seen in Saarinen’s “metamorphosis of forms” an “enchanted mountain” promising an organic relation of skyscraper to city not fully realized in his own work. According to Tafuri, though fulfilment of this promise also eluded Saarinen, it led him beyond the Chicago School’s laissez-faire affirmations of competition among isolated urban artifacts, to an attempted reconstitution of the tall office building as “an element capable of exercising a formal control over the urban complex as a whole.”11 In other words, for Tafuri the urbanistic success of the skyscraper depended on extending, to the scale of the city, the organicist “science of design” integrating the office into the building. But the “science of design” that Sullivan recognized in Saarinen’s entry was to undergo numerous rearticulations in subsequent decades. One trajectory of decisive importance was its passage into the hands of Saarinen’s son and successor, Eero Saarinen,

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whose work for major American corporations after the war we will consider in detail in the following chapters. But the younger Saarinen’s production must also be seen in the context of a parallel trajectory followed by this “science,” as it passed through the many office buildings whose anatomy was laid bare on the pages of every major professional journal during the late 1950s. In the 1930s, the office complex that would set the standard for all others was the multiarchitect effort at New York’s Rockefeller Center. Begun as an initiative to house the Metropolitan Opera on another site in 1927, over the course of the Great Depression the project for the development of four blocks in mid-Manhattan was transformed into a speculative real estate venture financed by

3.2 Eliel Saarinen, Chicago Tribune tower competition entry, 1922. 3.3 Associated Architects, Rockefeller Center, New York, 1928– 1940.

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the holdings of John D. Rockefeller Jr., who was able to use his formidable liquidity to take advantage of the depressed market. When the design team for Rockefeller Center—known as the Associated Architects, and composed of the smaller partnerships of Reinhard & Hofmeister; Corbett, Harrison & MacMurray; and Hood & Fouilhoux—studied the centerpiece of the complex (the future RCA Building) in the early 1930s, they found themselves at something of a crossroads in the history of office planning techniques. In the Chicago Tribune competition, entrants were required to provide two floor plans, one of the ground floor and the other of a typical office floor, but were not required to show interior layouts. Hence, no planning distinction was made between the lower floors of the building, which were to be occupied by the Tribune offices, and the upper floors, which were to be leased to commercial tenants. This reflected the common practice of fitting out speculative office floors to the specific needs of tenants upon occupancy, which left the architect, even the functionalist/organicist architect attentive to Sullivan’s doctrine, with the question of what interior “function” to express on the exterior of an empty building. As Tafuri points out, in the Tribune competition the absence of “functional requirements” in the competition brief encouraged scenographic solutions.12 But what he does not acknowledge is that the most functional architect-designed floor plan for this type of building by this time was already approaching the horizon of the empty shell. During the office building boom of the 1920s it became increasingly evident that from the standpoint of rentability the open plan was preferable, since experience showed that prebuilt spaces would often be substantially modified upon occupancy in any case. This was an issue already confronted by Peter Behrens as early as 1910, in his Mannesmann office building in Düsseldorf (completed in 1912), as he attempted to reconcile a cellular organicism with unpredictable changes in use.13 In other words, the only office spaces that could reasonably sustain internal layouts determined by the sort of functional requirements sought by Tafuri are those built for a single client whose needs were known in advance. Speculative office space was, by definition, functionally exempt from such a logic. Sullivan’s efforts to express aesthetically an internal cellularity on the building’s exterior, while emphasizing the vertical accumulation of such cells, merely reflected market conditions more sympathetic to prebuilt interiors. So it was never a question of projecting what Tafuri calls an “organic logic” onto the city,14 since an “organic logic” such as Sullivan’s had always already accommodated itself to the market. The only difference was that both market and “organism” had changed. By 1930 the professional journals could designate the open plan as the preferred alternative in office planning with a pragmatic matter-of-factness.15 Thus, as Rockefeller Center was being designed, the volatility and unpredictability of the real estate market had already begun to be internalized in office buildings.

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In Rockefeller Center itself, prospective tenants were encouraged to identify the complex as a new commercial locus whose urbanism and architecture sought to unify its disparate elements into a single, recognizable post-Depression monument to economic stability, a connotation also carried by the Rockefeller name. Its soaring verticals (reminiscent of Cass Gilbert’s 1913 “cathedral of commerce,” the Woolworth Building), were dedicated to the consecration of commerce as a source of urban unity and social stability, securely anchored in a base dedicated to culture and the arts—the catalyst for the center in the first place. Likewise its “five spot” site plan was at once dedicated to the modernist project of “light and air” and respectful of Beaux-Arts symmetries, complete with an abbreviated promenade architecturale culminating in the sunken restaurant/skating rink at the center’s core. Here it was, then: a singular spectacle of reconciliation between commerce and the city. That, as Tafuri argues, the center failed in its apparent project of actual unification beyond its borders is manifestly the case but should not be surprising. Rockefeller Center was reduced to the status of an isolated, lonely demonstration of the “civic art” from the very beginning, but not because of some internal contradiction between the drive toward organic unity and the chaos of commerce. Quite the opposite. It is precisely because Rockefeller Center succeeded—despite dire predictions to the contrary16—in projecting organic unity onto the disaggregated field of commerce that it “failed” as an instrument of a more general urban unification. In that sense, Sigfried Giedion’s formalistic reading of the center was accurate. He argues that its massing prevents the full apprehension of “the essential character of an organism like Rockefeller Center” if viewed from its central axis. Going so far as to describe the complex’s multifaceted surfaces as “curtain walls,” Giedion compared their visual effect to that of Harold Edgerton’s stroboscopic photograph of a golfer’s swing17 (a photograph nearly identical to the one later reproduced in Kepes’s Language of Vision as an illustration of dynamic visual organicity; see figure 2.11). In other words, it was the center’s visual dynamism, descended from the “metamorphosis of forms” in Eliel Saarinen’s Chicago Tribune tower project, that succeeded in harnessing the flux of capital—and ensured that it would be experienced as a source of economic and social integration, precisely because it distinguished itself from the surrounding city. What we see emerging here is the operative power of the corporate image, in which specifically modern aesthetic techniques are mobilized to project an image of dynamic, organic unity comparable to that sought by Kepes in the imagery of science. Rockefeller Center projects such an image not in some residually futile effort to unify the civic realm but as a marketing tool. The RCA Building was also notable for its slender proportions and represents a widely recognized prototype for the so-called slab office buildings that were to follow in the 1940s and 1950s.18 According to Raymond Hood, one of its primary architects,

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the process of arriving at the RCA’s slim, stepped-back form was one of pure ratio—a strictly numeric relationship between the dimensions of the floor plate and the size of the elevator core.19 Since the 1920s, and before air conditioning and fluorescent lighting came into widespread use in commercial structures during the 1950s, office planners had been engaged in debates about the marketability of windowless “deep space.”20 During the planning stages for Rockefeller Center, it was therefore decided that the ideal rentable depth of office space was 27 feet from the exterior wall. A structure the height of the RCA Building (sixty-six stories) was also necessarily divided into a series of zones stacked vertically, with each zone serviced by a designated elevator bank. As the building ascended, the number of elevators required in the core dropped off with each zone, until only those serving the uppermost floors remained. If the RCA Building had been designed as a simple, rectangular floor plate extruded sixty-six stories, substantial quantities of deep space would therefore have been produced as each elevator bank dropped off. Thus, the volume was stepped back each time an elevator bank terminated, in order to remain consistent with the 27-foot depth requirement established by market considerations. But the principle of optimized rentability was even more visibly reflected in the exterior elevations that unified the complex. As William Jordy has pointed out, the skins, or shells, of the Rockefeller Center buildings responded to the unpredictable needs of future tenants by offering a range of possible locations for the partitions that abutted the exterior walls, since the dimension of the intervening solid piers (3
6 and 6
3) allowed partitions to be placed anywhere along their width. As Jordy also observes, this fenestration pattern, which repeated that of Hood’s Daily News Building (1930), favored a flattened-out neo-Gothic over the less flexible but more “modern” option of continuous, horizontal fenestration allowing partitions only at the window mullions, available to the Associated Architects through the model of Hood’s McGrawHill Building (also completed in 1930).21 Still, the flatness of its facades already hinted at a new dynamism that was to respond to such forces as they exceeded ever-higher

3.4 Associated Architects, RCA Building, Rockefeller Center, 1933. Typical floor plan.

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thresholds of tolerance. It was as if the financial events of October 1929 were to be subsequently accounted for in an architecture in which stability was forsaken for a pragmatic recognition of the forces of unpredictable change, registered in the exterior wall of the building. Neo-Gothic verticality was converted, with the window-pierwindow system, into a means of maintaining what Giedion recognized as a “dynamic equilibrium,” plainly visible on the building’s surfaces if one chose to look.22 With the gridded office buildings of the postwar period, this gesture toward the dynamism of capital was made overt, in a further externalization (and internalization) of the capitalist—and organicist—logic of growth and change.

In 1945 L. Andrew Reinhard and Henry Hofmeister—office planning experts and two of the principal architects on the Rockefeller Center team from the start—assessed the “new trends” in office design: “The modern office is brightened and enlivened by dozens of new materials, both structural and decorative; by new forms and curves; by modern lighting and air conditioning and acoustic treatment and office machinery and conveniences of many kinds. By all the devices and arts of modern architecture, decoration, furnishing and display. This trend may have brought harrying problems to office building managers. But it has also improved the effectiveness and efficiency of the office.”23 Although these remarks clearly adhere to the requirement that architectural criticism recycle even office space through some “new trend,” they also imply—at an early date—a more substantial shift in the performative character of office space. What these planners mean by improved “effectiveness and efficiency” becomes clearer when they associate the increased popularity of modern design with office tenants (“something more advanced than the heavy dignity of tradition”) with the advancing role of interior office design in corporate marketing that was directed inward as well as outward: This salesmanship is not devoted entirely to the firm’s clientele. For if this is a seller’s market, it also belongs to employees. The workers in the office “bull pen” are having their day, and more is being done for them. They are getting not only better light, better ventilation and better working conditions, but also improved and more cheerful surroundings. This might be considered a

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long-term trend as well as a current necessity; in any case it is a factor that will increasingly improve the office and add to the problem of the office planner.24 Quietly, incrementally, the “cathedrals of commerce” inventoried in the Chicago Tribune tower competition and scattered in the myriad, isolated expressions of corporate identity in cities across the United States were being secularized. These advertisements for enchantment that invoked a proto-Gothic corporatism against the artificiality of the metropolis began to mutate into modern environments dedicated to the well-being of the worker. The office, hollowed out in Rockefeller Center into a flexible, rhythmic shell, was being proffered to employees as well as to clients as a form of community. Meanwhile workers, beneficiaries of the “light and air” sold at Rockefeller Center, were themselves in the process being converted from Taylorized machines into “humans,” in recognition of the operative value of an empathic relation between manager and employee, clothed in the image of modernity. All of these changes were accessible through a “physiognomic perception” aided by modern architecture. In the name of the corporation as productive organism, offices were becoming social condensers. “Human relations,” the name given to the attempt to improve productivity by appealing to the employee’s sense of identification with the corporation, is precariously rooted in the so-called Hawthorne experiments, the focus of a study conducted by faculty members of the Harvard School of Business at the Western Electric Hawthorne plant outside of Chicago from 1927 to 1933. The study eventually fell under the direction of the psychologist Elton Mayo, whose name has since become closely identified with human relations dogma. In the experiments themselves, a group of assembly workers were isolated in a “test room” in which environmental parameters and economic incentives were systematically varied to test their effects on worker productivity. To the surprise of the experimenters, productivity in the test room remained consistent or even increased under increasingly adverse environmental conditions. These results generated conflicting hypotheses, but what emerged from the subsequent publications analyzing the study, including Mayo’s Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization (1933), was an interpretation—since shown to be largely arbitrary—that attributed the observed increase in productivity to a heightened sense of identification with the corporate institution on the part of the workers in the test room, simply by virtue of their participation in the experiments.25 On this basis, Mayo and his colleagues concluded that productivity in the factory could be enhanced through methods designed to relate to the worker as a member of a social group. These included interviewing workers to determine whether they were prone to, or had been subjected to, dysfunctional social relations in their family

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lives. For Mayo, who drew to some extent on Freudian psychoanalysis, the manager became in effect a therapist—charged with looking after the worker’s psychic wellbeing and with systematically constructing worker identification with the corporation understood as a basic social unit, comparable to (and even substituting for) the worker’s family. Like the earlier techniques for optimizing mechanical productivity developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor and by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, the degree to which the techniques of “human relations” were actually applied in the work environment varied from corporation to corporation. But by the late 1940s, a decade and a half after Mayo’s Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization first appeared, and immediately following a series of bitter postwar labor disputes, a doctrine of management-worker cooperation had become conventional wisdom among many executives.26 In a broad sense, this represented the long-term effect of a “managerial revolution” initiated in the late nineteenth century, which had seen the rise of a managerial class responsible for the administration of the day-to-day operations of the largest American corporations. As this class emerged, it established a new set of social and technological principles that might be grouped together under the heading of “control.”27 And indeed, human relations theory has significant discursive and historical ties with the systems and cybernetics-based control logics we have already encountered. Both, it may be said, seek to link diverse forms knowledge into an encompassing managerial loop. The most direct of such ties dates to the influential seminar conducted from 1932 to 1934 by the physiologist-turned-sociologist Lawrence J. Henderson at Harvard on the works of the Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto. Henderson saw Pareto’s thought as a model for social integration that could be mobilized against the inroads made by Marxism into American sociology, an agenda that by 1960 led one observer to characterize Henderson as “the greatest rationalizer of authoritarian conservatism of our time.”28 Among the small circle who regularly attended the seminars were Mayo, Fritz Roethlisberger (another major spokesman for human relations theory), and the sociologist Talcott Parsons, who acknowledged that the title of his 1951 book, The Social System, was indebted to Pareto’s emphasis on the scientific concept of “system.” Henderson compared Pareto’s notion of social systems seeking equilibrium with a notion of the system as a functional whole in dynamic equilibrium based in part on the work of the physicist Willard Gibbs (also an important source for Wiener’s cybernetics) on physico-chemical equilibria, as well as that of Walter B. Cannon (a reference shared by Wiener, Giedion, and Kepes) on biological self-regulation, or homeostasis. Along with Cannon, Henderson thus represented a major proponent of a systemsbased revision to the functionalist organicism received by Louis Sullivan as “form follows function,” converting it into a “science” of social organization.29 Mayo’s and Roethlisberger’s ties to this endeavor underscore the organicist dimensions of the hu-

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man relations project, in which integration into the “social system” of the corporation was solicited through appeals to the employee’s “humanity,” made in the name of increased productivity but actualized as a social bond. Although earlier notions of the corporation as family were reflected in architecture with such works as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Building (1906),30 during the postwar period the spatial logic of the corporate “family” visibly changed, in concert with technical innovations made by the architects of office buildings who were promoting spatial flexibility. This is not to say that architects and office planners self-consciously applied principles derived from human relations discourse (there is little evidence of this), or that the two practices simply operated on analogous or even homologous terms. Here again, in the new landscape of the organizational complex, distinct cultural practices cease merely to reflect one another’s premises through such relays. Instead, they interact like the patterns cascading up and down in scale in Kepes’s book, patterns that were given formal articulation by Charles and Ray Eames in Powers of Ten (1968, 1977), their classic cinematic short. That is, they mirror and map onto one another in different ways and to different degrees, through a convergence of communicative media—photography, film, architecture, and so on—bearing what Norbert Wiener lucidly called the “message” of organization, including management treatises written by human relations experts. Thus, in their 1945 article cited above, the office planners Reinhard and Hofmeister take the readers of Architectural Record through a series of office interiors planned by their firm, including the Rockefeller Center prototype. In these examples, the “T” configuration, with two small private offices at the exterior wall sharing an internal

3.5 Fritz Roethlisberger, “Diagram Showing the Interaction of Various Related Fields.” From Human Relations: Rare, Medium, or Well-Done? (1954), 135.

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reception and secretarial space, is identified as the “theoretical unit” for office space— an adaptable planning module roughly 16 feet wide by 27 feet deep, abstracted from the Rockefeller Center layout. By the mid-1950s, however, this unit, into which was condensed a basic manager-staff hierarchy characteristic of most administrative offices, had been replaced by a much smaller and more abstract module. Usually rang-

3.6 Typical office plans, RCA Building, Rockefeller Center (1933). From L. Andrew Reinhard and Henry Hofmeister, “New Trends in Office Design,” Architectural Record 97, no. 3 (March 1945): 100. 3.7 Typical “T” office plan. From L. Andrew Reinhard and Henry Hofmeister, “New Trends in Office Design,” Architectural Record 97, no. 3 (March 1945): 100.

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ing from 4
6 to 5
square, it was distributed in a virtual, organizational matrix—a grid—capable of accommodating office partitions, ceiling tiles, lighting fixtures, and furniture, in any number of combinations. Compared to the window-pier-window system of Rockefeller Center, this gridded module exhibited a lesser degree of flexibility, in exchange for a greater degree of integration.

On the outside, the new physiognomy of the office was registered in the curtain wall. And although there are numerous earlier examples of commercial buildings with large expanses of glass, the United Nations Secretariat, begun in 1948 and completed by 1950, was the first major office building of the postwar period to use a full-height curtain wall suspended off the structure for two of its main exposures.31 The building, whose design was supervised by Wallace Harrison (one of the architects for Rockefeller Center), was clad in tinted glass on its east and west facades, with steel glazing mullions set at 4 feet on center. As a result, the prefabricated office partitions utilized in the interior of the building could be set only at 4-foot intervals— a significant reduction in interior planning flexibility, compared to that in the RCA Building. In addition, since it was the mullion centerlines (and thus only the centers of the partitions) that were 4 feet apart, the actual clear space in the minimum office possible behind this wall was slightly under 8 feet, which proved functionally inadequate.32 Already here, a central tension that was to characterize the transformation of the office building after the Second World War also becomes evident. It was a tension between the twin imperatives of flexibility and standardization, which, though not mutually exclusive, do not necessarily imply one another, even in modular planning. By 1957 the confusion regarding this issue was such that Richard Roth—a partner in Emery Roth & Sons, a firm responsible for thirty-seven office buildings built during the previous ten years in midtown Manhattan—authoritatively advocated continuous, modular fenestration for its superior flexibility: Architecturally strong and impressive as the Radio City masses may be, they do not, with their window-pier-window design, allow for this interior planning flexibility. Therefore—the new exterior design to suit interior plan spacing. It is as simple as that! Window-mullion-window (445 Park Avenue—Kahn & Jacobs); strip building with continuous windows and continuous masonry spandrels (575 Madison Avenue—Emery Roth & Sons);

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metal and glass “skin” buildings (Lever House—Skidmore, Owings & Merrill); and the metal and metal with the windows losing their accent in the dominance of the metal (99 Park Avenue— Emery Roth & Sons).33 Unlike that found in the RCA Building, Roth’s “flexibility” takes the form of a highly organized aesthetic and technological system into which units of space were to be integrated—the system of standardized components such as office partitions, lighting fixtures, furniture, and so on that American industry had generated after the war.34 But there is more written into this discourse. For example, when Progressive Architecture devoted an entire issue to the question of “modular assembly” in November 1957, its editors accompanied their introduction with a series of extended

3.8 (previous page) Harrison & Abramowitz et al.,United Nations headquarters, New York, 1948–1952. Secretariat building. Photograph by Ezra Stoller. 3.9 Harrison & Abramowitz et al., United Nations Secretariat, New York. Office interior. 3.10 Emery Roth & Sons, various office buildings, New York, 1950s. From Richard Roth, “High Rise Down to Earth,” Progressive Architecture 38, no. 6 (June 1957): 199.

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quotations from such architects as Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Richard Neutra, and Frank Lloyd Wright on the desirability of standardized modular construction methods. They also included the following quotation from Kepes, excerpted from the section in The New Landscape in Art and Science on “symmetry, proportion, module” that contained various images of architecture: Modular coordination, in its aspect of standardized products and manufacturing processes, is inherent in the condition of our time. . . . Two cans of pea soup are more alike than two peas. Units fit into the production process and combine with other units, as interest in the interconnections between modular units keeps pace with the development of the units themselves. The factors common to units become much more than repeated size and shape, and are extended to include the units’ capacity for being joined together. There is an increasing tendency to produce standard modular units which interlock without the intervention of such aids as nails and glue. Implicit in this development is the search for modules with the greatest combinatory possibilities; the ideal is a standard module that can be coupled with others into the widest variety of products. Radio sets are made with standardized tubes and components; buildings are assembled from prefabricated members; machines have interchangeable parts. Even the screw lost from a doorknob is immediately replaceable at the nearest hardware store. Buildings, bridges, motorcars have endowed the modular relation with vital importance in human thought and activity.35 Seen in the context of Kepes’s attempts to organize the visual field, the editors’ inclusion of this passage is telling, since the most prominent image uniting the various studies of coordinated standardization in the special issue is the modular grid. The issue culminates in the exposition of a coordinated dimensioning system based on grids of various sizes that was never implemented. The graphic system of grids within grids would theoretically have enabled the architect to “see” standardized modules at all scales and to detail a building accordingly. This was strictly in accordance with the “pattern-seeing” advocated by Kepes in the technologized new landscape and reflected in the excerpts in Progressive Architecture. Although full modular coordination of the construction industry was never achieved in the United States, hundreds of office buildings constructed in the decades following the war did attain the nearly complete fusion of aesthetic techniques advocating modular coordination with extant technical means for implementing it, whether or not these involved actual mass pro-

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duction or prefabrication. With the curtain wall, the instrumentality of the corporate image went beyond the construction of the empty shell of a collective organism, as in Rockefeller Center. Through the grids shimmering across the pages of professional journals, this image began to weld itself onto the internal organization of the corporate entity itself. Also in 1957, a special issue of the Architectural Review titled Machine Made America cited a 1955 technical report, Curtain Walls of Stainless Steel Construction, issued by the Princeton University School of Architecture in response to a request from industry groups.36 This report was followed up by a conference sponsored by the American Building Research Institute (ABRI) in 1956. Both sought to classify the different types of curtain walls. But while the Princeton report noted that its classification was “based on the construction of the wall and not its finished appearance,” the second study, which was cited in detail in Machine Made America, took the opposite position: it stated that “the first classification of curtain walls should be based on appearance.”37 Accordingly, four types of curtain walls were enumerated at Princeton and rehearsed by the Architectural Review, differentiated by distinct visual characteristics: “sheath” walls, in which no structural elements are indicated on the exterior skin; “grid” walls, in which horizontal and vertical structural elements are expressed with equal emphasis; “mullion” walls, where vertical structural elements are emphasized; and “spandrel” walls, in which horizontal structural elements are emphasized. Thus visual patterns became the basis for physiognomic comparisons of office buildings, whether in the Kepes-like diagrams illustrating the Princeton report or in the Architectural Review’s comparative physiognomy of American curtain walls, which, it noted, had become available to architects as an off-the-shelf system a year earlier (in 1956). The science and technology of the office had become an art. As the 1956 ABRI

3.11 Curtain wall classifications. From School of Architecture, Princeton University,Curtain Walls of Stainless Steel Construction (1955), 13.

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3.12 Curtain wall classifications. From Machine Made America, Architectural Review 121, no. 724 (May 1957): 300.

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conference report put it, “Almost any system of construction can be used to achieve any one of the common curtain wall appearances.”38 What all these “appearances” had in common, however, was the direct visual presentation of an internal organizational system. In that regard, physiognomy corresponded to anatomy in a strictly organicist sense, with the difference that the expression of a structural system, celebrated since the nineteenth century as the very essence of the architectural organism, was reduced to the status of one gridded pattern among many as it conformed to the integrated rhythms of a modulated field. In 1952, two years after the completion of the United Nations Secretariat, the “sheath”-type curtain wall found its full realization in the new headquarters of the Lever Brothers Corporation, manufacturers of soaps and household cleansers, on Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan. With its blue-tinted glazing and wired-glass spandrel panels suspended in a stainless steel-clad system of mullions and transoms, Lever House, designed by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), represented an early and relatively extreme effort to flatten out the skin. Similar efforts were visible in the many curtain walls that followed, to such an extent that during the 1956 conference Robert W. McLaughlin, director of the School of Architecture at

3.13 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Lever House, New York, 1952. Photograph by Ezra Stoller.

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Princeton, diagnosed a generalized “fetish for flatness” in office buildings of the period.39 Such flatness was in marked contrast to the modeled facades of Mies van der Rohe’s Lake Shore Drive Apartments of 1948, on which Bunshaft’s reductive “machinemade” aesthetic was only superficially based. The editors of Architectural Review hypothesized that “the Lever building seems to offer a direct line of communication,” as opposed to Mies’s supposedly less accessible “subtleties of modeling,” which they claimed accounts for the popularity of the flat wall.40 The difference was only a matter of inches, with the applied mullions on Mies’s Lake Shore Drive buildings projecting almost 6 inches from the glazing, and the face of Bunshaft’s Lever House mullions projecting only 11⁄4 inches. But it was all that was necessary even for the editors of a professional journal to distinguish between dynamism incarnate and mere “communication.” The interior of the main volume of Lever House, a slab oriented perpendicularly to the street and rising twenty-four stories above a two-story base, was somewhat less typical of the many office towers that SOM would execute during the subsequent decade. Most distinctly, the elevator core was positioned not at the center of the slab (as in both the RCA Building and the United Nations Secretariat) but at the end farthest from Park Avenue. Except for the mullions that dictated partition locations, the interiors were decidedly devoid of grids, perhaps making it easier for the streamliner Raymond Loewy to impart to the executive suite a stylized image distinctly different from the standardized facades. Following the completion of Lever House, SOM began in quick succession a series of high-profile office towers for corporate clients in urban contexts, many under Bunshaft’s supervision. They included the Inland Steel headquarters in Chicago, completed in 1958 (and designed by Bruce Graham), and the headquarters of the Union Carbide Corporation on Park Avenue in Manhattan, completed in 1960, and those of the Chase Manhattan Bank, completed in 1961 in lower Manhattan in the vicinity of Wall Street, both designed by Bunshaft. All of these represented variations on the slab pattern, but with significant differences in the location of the elevator cores as well as in the location and expression of the building’s structural frame. One tendency that emerged with these structures—which was by no means unique to the production of SOM—was the use of materials representative of the industry to which the corporation belonged. Thus was modern architecture’s obsession with hygiene converted into publicity for a soap manufacturer—a fact not lost on the editors of Business Week, who characterized Lever House as “spacious, efficient, and washable” in 1952.41 As if to underscore the point, every seventh vertical mullion holding the fixed glazing of Lever House in place was equipped with a raised rail on which rode a mechanized window-washing machine.42 Even more literal was the predominance of stainless steel in SOM’s headquarters for Inland Steel and the use of a black stainless steel newly developed by Union Carbide on that company’s headquarters building. More comprehensive still were the campaigns to incorporate the client’s

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product carried out by Harrison & Abramowitz, first with their all-aluminum curtain wall, office partitions, and wiring in the headquarters of the Alcoa Corporation in Pittsburgh, completed in 1953, and subsequently with the extensive use of glass as a finish material inside and out in the New York headquarters of the Corning Glass Corporation, completed in 1959. These efforts, and others like them, were far more direct than those of Peter Behrens in his AEG turbine factory in Berlin (1909), in which the hinged base of a three-pointed arch was absorbed into a distantly classical giant order ponderously alluding to the dynamics of mechanization, a metaphoric displacement that took the detail well beyond its structural utility or any explicit reference to the company’s products.43 By contrast, in the work of SOM and their peers in the United States after the Second World War, the message was as direct as the advertisements produced for the same corporations in the national and trade weeklies. In addition to aspiring to a communication that avoided unnecessary subtlety or allusion, these new office buildings evidenced a convergence only dreamed of in the days of the Bauhaus Corporation and its efforts to sell modern architecture to industry.44 With companies such as Inland Steel, Union Carbide, Alcoa, US Steel, and Corning, modern fabrication and distribution methods had brought both potential standardization and a host of brand names competing for recognition in the marketplace. And as total construction volume increased fourfold in the United States between 1946 and 1956,45 for a brief period the rhetorical “industry” of modernity, the silent antihero of Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command, coincided with the construction industry. Although this industry was not to remain its own client for very long, the convergence afforded architects like Bunshaft opportunities to exploit, with acute matter-of-factness, the temporary transparence of signifier to signified in the gleaming skins of the office building.46 While these buildings were thus corporate advertisements comparable to those exhibited by Kepes in Language of Vision, the mature modular systems produced by SOM during the late 1950s also attempted a further internalization of capitalist growth by inscribing “flexibility” into every surface of the office. As a newly anointed patron of modern architecture subject to unpredictable market and technological forces, the corporation was perceived as a source of unlimited organizational evolution. Consequently, it was no longer architecture’s role to respond to preestablished standards like Sullivan’s “cells.” Instead, the architecture practiced by firms such as SOM sought to incorporate its own obsolescence into itself by dissolving its organs into three-dimensional modular matrices. In principle, everything passed through the gridded lines of the curtain wall and projected backward into every square inch of office behind it. These skins, therefore, did more than just impart an image of modernity to the many corporations they serviced. The corporation, well understood by the human relations engineers as a model for society, had opened its densely impacted layers out into the light. But the imperatives of organization as an instrument

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of institutional power had not dissolved along with the heavy partitions of the earlytwentieth-century office. Instead, they were carried to a more advanced level. The Inland Steel Building, completed by SOM in 1958, summarizes many of these developments. As a response to a request from Clarence Randall, the company’s chairman, for a building “like a man with immaculate English tailoring,” the project represented an investment in what the company’s building committee called “unique institutional identification,” or corporate image.47 Located in the center of Chicago’s commercial Loop, close to several of its Chicago School predecessors (including Sullivan’s own Carson, Pirie, Scott department store (1904), this nineteen-story, gleaming stainless steel and glass tower designed by Bruce Graham (head designer in the firm’s Chicago office) was, according to Architectural Forum, a “Lever-shaped tower turned inside-out.”48 The building’s service core was displaced into an adjoining, smaller tower, and massive steel columns were disposed in an even spacing along the outer face of the curtain wall. The result was 10,000 square feet of open space per floor, none more than 28 feet from a window. By comparison, Lever House had 6,000 square feet per floor within 26 feet of a window, but still interrupted by a row of interior columns. According to SOM’s calculations, this plan would provide office space “17% more effi-

3.14 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Inland Steel headquarters, Chicago, 1958. Photograph by Ezra Stoller. 3.15 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Inland Steel headquarters, Chicago, 1958. Plan with module.

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cient than average.”49 At the time the building was designed in 1955, the span of the steel frame was also the longest attempted in a tall office building, while the projecting exterior columns significantly modified the flatness of the earlier curtain walls, effectively transferring it to the building’s interior. The entire building was on a 5
2 planning grid, reflected in its curtain wall. Inland Steel occupied eight floors in the building, with the remainder rented to other businesses—including the Chicago office of SOM, which by this time had organized itself on the corporate model of many of its clients.50

To the degree that they employed techniques designed to maximize integrated, organized flexibility, Inland Steel and other “inside-out” office buildings designed by SOM—such as the Crown Zellerbach building then under development in San Francisco and the Chase Manhattan Bank headquarters to follow in New York— were also linked to domestic experiments carried out during the early 1940s in anticipation of a postwar housing boom. In 1942 the editors of Architectural Forum asked thirty-three American architects to project “the new house of 194X,” paying specific heed to the axiom of “variety within standardization.” This axiom, which also applied to the office buildings that followed a decade and a half later, sought to take advantage of wartime prefabrication methods to provide housing on a large scale, while simultaneously making it possible to delineate individuated family units by means of their houses and anticipating the reorganization of the postwar nuclear family into unpredictable configurations.51 SOM were among those architects who submitted designs for the project. Their contribution, titled “Flexible Space,” was based on a diagram of an outboard structural frame and service core with an uninterrupted, flexibly divisible interior space virtually identical to that of the Inland Steel Building. Rather than design a house, SOM designed a system with, in their terms, a standardized “vocabulary” of shell, utility units, partition units, storage units, and furniture, and with a “grammar” of modular combinations that allowed a variety of “compositions” within the same basic parameters.52 The rooms pictured, complete with modular ceilings, were uncanny prefigurations of the office spaces to come; and the accompanying text all but summarizes the approach the designers would later take when confronted with the problem of the tall office building: How may space be divided? Rectangles, completely spanned by trusses, bents or other methods, permit freedom of interior

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division by storage units and screening elements for careful zoning and conditioning of space for use, and for visual space design. Areas may interlock and flow into each other. Privacy and comfort can be maintained without complete compartmentalization. In the plans shown, definite divisions have been made between activity and quiet zones. Such rectangular space as shelter, with attached or enclosed utility units, could be fairly well standardized for construction in different regions, and left as such until a family moved in with its own dividing units which in the case of storage units may be used for packing and shipping. This does not indicate a belief in nomadism—even an established family may wish the alterations easily effected with such flexibility.53 This last disavowal of the “nomadism” implied by the house conceived as a standardized and easily transportable package clearly alludes to the demountable “Dymaxion dwelling machines” of Buckminster Fuller, and perhaps even more specifically to a project designed by Fuller not long before the Architectural Forum study. Two

3.16 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, “Flexible Space.” From “The New House of 194X,” Architectural Forum 77, no. 3 (September 1942): 101.

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years earlier, in 1940, the same magazine published Fuller’s “mechanical wing,” a portable core or “compact, mobile package in which the mechanical essentials of contemporary U.S. living can be transported to the Vermont farmhouse, or incorporated in a permanent dwelling.”54 As an extension of Fuller’s project for an optimized, lightweight, mass-produced house, this “wing” on a trailer was an immediate predecessor of the equally portable Dymaxion Deployment Unit, adapted from a metal grain silo and exhibited in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in November 1941.55 But SOM’s insistence in their house project on what they called the “inherent flexibility and structural stability” of rectangular form, and their rejection of the “inherent disadvantages” of the “[f ]ixed geometrical forms, of the types recently suggested by a number of ‘radical designers’” (again, most likely a reference to Fuller),56 marked a significant and conscious departure from the optimal spaces designed around Taylorized dwelling activities, as seen in Fuller’s 4D Dymaxion House of 1927 or the Dymaxion Bathroom of 1937. Nevertheless, traces of Fuller’s treatment of the house as a logistical problem of deployment remained discernible in other experiments in domestic reorganization carried out on the pages of American professional journals during the war. The same year—1942—that SOM submitted their contribution to the Architectural Forum postwar house project, California Arts and Architecture, the magazine that under the stewardship of its editor John Entenza would sponsor the Case Study Houses program after the war, announced an open competition titled “Designs for

3.17 Eero Saarinen and Oliver Lundquist, proposed postwar house with “Pre-Assembled Components (PACs).” Winning entry, “Designs for Postwar Living,” California Arts and Architecture 60 (August 1943): 28.

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Postwar Living.” The winning entries, selected by a jury that included Charles Eames, were published in the magazine’s August 1943 issue; first prize went to Eames’s friend Eero Saarinen, in collaboration with Oliver Lundquist. Saarinen and Lundquist proposed an efficiently designed core of mass-producible, preassembled components (or “PACs”), surrounded by a more loosely laid-out modular living area. The PACs, formed out of a resin-bonded plywood hull, were reserved for what were designated as the “biological and mechanical functions—sleeping, dressing, bathing, cooking, washing, heating, and cooling”; the “living,” or social, areas of the house were flexibly panelized for variety of arrangement.57 The two types of domestic space into which the house is divided utilized massproduced components in correspondingly different ways. The molded “biological and mechanical functions” of the house were, like the furniture designs with which Saarinen and Eames won the Museum of Modern Art “Organic Design” competition of 1940–1941, stamped out in a plywood hull. But the modular and infinitely flexible matrix of “living” space, associated with the supposed idiosyncrasies manifest in the social context of each family, was more suited to panelization. “Biological and mechanical functions” applied to all clients, while “social” functions were variable according to local conditions internal and external to the family. Second place in the competition went to a house for a “typical defense plant worker” by another future designer of office buildings, I. M. Pei, in collaboration with E. H. Duhart. The Pei-Duhart house was organized around a similar division: an efficiently

3.18 I. M. Pei and E. H. Duhart, second-place entry, “Designs for Postwar Living,” California Arts and Architecture 60 (August 1943): 32.

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3.19 Models “measuring space and motion and family living as the basis for dwelling design” from the John B. Pierce Foundation (above), and diagrams of figures engaged in domestic activities (below). From Charles Eames, John Entenza, and Herbert Matter, “What Is a House?” Arts and Architecture 61 (July 1944): 37.

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planned pressed aluminum service core was attached to a gridded and panelized “home room.” Here the correlations could not be more explicit. What these architects described as an open, flexible “space for family life,” the same space provided by SOM and Saarinen in their schemes for the postwar house, would be magnified (again like the photomicrographs published by Kepes and the cascading scales of the Eameses’ Powers of Ten) into the open, modular floor plans of office buildings like the Inland Steel headquarters.58 With this mutation, the specifically “social” as opposed to “biological” spaces of the family, as they were called, were inscribed into the social condenser of the postwar office building. The “typical defense plant worker” of the Pei-Duhart scheme, the “housewife” and the “postwar worker” inhabiting another Pei and Duhart house project published in Arts and Architecture in 1944, the “Alphas” and the “Omegas” for whom Richard Neu-

3.20 Charles Eames, John Entenza, and Herbert Matter, “The Family,” diagram. From “What Is a House?” Arts and Architecture 61 (July 1944): 32.

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tra designed unrealized Case Study Houses, the “Mr. and Mrs. X” inhabiting Case Study House no. 1 by J. R. Davidson, the standardized figures in family-like clusters drawn by Ray Eames for the cover of Arts and Architecture’s special 1944 issue on prefabrication, and those same figures in perfectly Taylorized positions as they performed the “typical” household activities enumerated inside—all were standardized character types who formed a hypothetical clientele for the new modern house built around such a “family” reconstituted in the aftermath of war. That the corporation was figured as the institutional correlate of this very same family through subterranean links between its structures and those of houses projected by its architects a decade earlier should be no surprise. The postwar family was the ultimate “organism,” the last holdout of an enchanted American Gemeinschaft, or organic community, now redeployed and reorganized into a flexible matrix. Contra Fuller, houses were no longer standardized “units”; and contra Sullivan, offices were no longer standardized “cells.” This condensation of modular flexibility and organic community can be seen more clearly still in one more set of examples at the domestic scale. In July 1944, Arts and Architecture devoted an entire issue to prefabrication. It included “What Is a House?,” an article in which John Entenza, Charles Eames, and Herbert Matter, explicitly referring to Fuller, distinguish between those parts of the house that could be optimized to serve a set of standardized needs (kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, and storage rooms) and the “living” areas of the house that required a flexible organizational format in order to respond to the needs of individual families and family members.59 This distinction was repeated at a larger scale in the distinction of service core and rentable space typical of nearly all postwar office towers. Here also, four years before the publication of Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command, a Taylorization of household tasks common in earlier modernisms was affiliated with an aesthetics of movement. The Herbert Matter image of a man dressing included as an illustration—a photographic record of the man’s movements traced in the air with light—was later included in László Moholy-Nagy’s Vision in Motion. And already in 1942, the Saarinen-Lundquist “Postwar House” winning competition entry had included a built-in dressing area arranged around a “dressing radius,” or the space traced out by a body’s movements during the act of dressing, organized around the reflective surface of a mirror. Also in 1942, Eero Saarinen designed a hypothetical community center utilizing the products of the United States Gypsum Company. The project was published as a four-page advertisement for that company in the March issue of Architectural Forum, under the heading “Demountable Space.”60 It was a square pavilion lifted off the ground, again designed to accommodate the unpredictable needs of community, this time quite literally. The entire building, which bore clear traces of Fuller’s 4D Dymaxion House with its central structural mast and suspension cables, was laid out on a 12-foot by 12-foot grid, into which were inserted standardized panels (to be prefabricated by United States Gypsum) interspersed with windows. Inside, it was to be entirely finished

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3.21 Herbert Matter, Man Dressing, n.d. From Charles Eames, John Entenza, and Herbert Matter, “What Is a House?” Arts and Architecture 61 (July 1944): 36.

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in United States Gypsum products. With its patterned, panelized, prefabricated facades, the community center anticipates the house that Saarinen’s friends (and then colleagues at the Cranbrook Academy) Charles and Ray Eames designed for themselves in Santa Monica in 1949. The connection becomes particularly clear when the link to Fuller is passed through the 1944 “What Is a House?” article (coauthored by Charles Eames), which effectively stated the theoretical terms under which the Eameses would produce their own house.61

3.22 Eero Saarinen and Oliver Lundquist, “Dressing Radius.” From winning entry, “Designs for Postwar Living,” California Arts and Architecture 60 (August 1943): 31. 3.23 Eero Saarinen, “Demountable Space.” Design for a community center as an advertisement for United States Gypsum Co., Architectural Forum 76, no. 3 (March 1942): 50–51.

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But Saarinen’s project must also be seen as belonging to his own early exploration of Fuller’s ideas, carried forward several years later (1945) with the hypothetical prefabricated metal “unfolding house,” which was equipped with a segmented roof that could be unfolded to provide additional space. Again flexibility was associated with the unpredictable needs of a postwar American family defined by change, after having already been projected onto a multiuse social condenser (a “social center”) for a postwar community made up of such families—the constituents of what its author rather mechanically referred to as a “changing civilization.” Family, community, and society—three different scales of organism—are here telescoped together, in compliance with the multiply scaled images that Norbert Wiener called “pure patterns in a natural world,” images laid out a decade later by Kepes as the topography of his new landscape, in which a longed-for unity of microcosm and macrocosm unfolded. The tall office buildings of the 1950s can thus be seen as inhabiting one more scale in this self-similar cascade. Following along the lines of Inland Steel, the diagram of “flexible space” deployed by SOM in their “house of 194X”—an outboard frame spanning modular open space—was repeated in the headquarters of the Chase Manhattan Bank in lower Manhattan, designed by Bunshaft and completed in 1961, but this time with the service core absorbed back into the center of the rectangular volume. What began as a simple plan for corporate expansion was transformed into a monumental effort to revitalize New York’s Wall Street business district, which had been threatened by the new concentration of corporations in the formerly residential stretch of Park Avenue in midtown, whose conversion to a new commercial center had been pioneered by Lever House. Downtown, one block of Cedar Street was closed off in order to cover the entire site with a large one-story base housing a Chase branch bank, out of which would rise the sixty-story rectangular shaft of the new headquarters. This “little Rockefeller Center” (as it was called at the time, in reference to Chase president David Rockefeller) was part of a large-scale strategy for urban revitalization developed by SOM, including a proposal for “walk-to-work” row houses nearby.62 The plan was promoted under the auspices of the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Association (DLMA), a group of businesses with an interest in the economic future of the area, founded by Rockefeller in 1956. By the 1970s, this initiative to expose the dark canyons of Wall Street to the planning methods of “light and air,” with freestanding shafts set off by open plazas—based on research begun at Rockefeller Center—had borne fruit not only in the realization of the Chase complex and the nearby Marine Midland Bank headquarters (also by SOM, 1967) but also in the World Trade Center, designed by Minoru Yamasaki in collaboration with Emery Roth & Sons.63 The SOM “superblock” plan for Chase Manhattan was intended to position the Chase headquarters as the focus of what Nathaniel Owings called “a new town within the city,” in which, “around this twenty-first century edition of the Boston Common in downtown

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Manhattan, Chase could be the visual and acknowledged leader.” As Owings put it, with the appearance of the World Trade Center, “The dream of the intimately scaled downtown village was lost but an armature remained upon which the dynamics of change could grow with health and strength.”64 Tafuri views the heirs to the legacy of Rockefeller Center, including the World Trade Center, as further symptoms of a “desperation shared by intellectuals and businessmen alike—the desperation of one who sees himself impotent to control, with his antiquated instruments, the enigmatic course of the indomitable White Whale” of the capitalist metropolis. For him, these were “antiurban paradoxes, artificial technological ‘miracles.’”65 Surely the new headquarters of the Chase Manhattan Bank, which transposed Rockefeller Center’s impossible project of urban reunification onto lower Manhattan, also belongs in this category. But Owings’s organicist rhetoric could not be more explicit about the concomitant shift to which Chase also bears witness; the mutation of the bounded stability of the village into an open “armature” that, like the grids of SOM’s office buildings, homeostatically regulates the dynamics of growth and change in order to preserve the health of the corporate (and urban) organism. The priority of the organism and of organic community is conserved. Tafuri evaluates the failure of these complexes to overcome their “artificiality” in light of their (and his) own organicist premises, which, as Owings’s remarks confirm, coincide with the interests of the corporations. But he does not acknowledge that the “organic,” too—

3.24 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Chase Manhattan Bank headquarters, New York, 1961.

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precisely because it is tied to capital, rather than hopelessly braced against it—has changed beyond recognition, to all but those possessed of a new vision capable of renaturalizing the artificial landscape of the city. Seen against the background of the human relations project, efforts to install organizations like Chase at the center of a newly reinvigorated downtown acquire a different patina. Their exhausted systematicity can indeed be read as symptomatic of a loss of control over the city, which was at the same moment expressed in the flight of these “antiurban” corporate machines to the outlying regions. But the prospect of their organismic success, premised on identification with the corporation as a social unit comparable to the family, cuts a significantly more ominous figure. Still, to what extent was the project of homeostatic pattern maintenance actually achieved within these machines, even as they cut themselves off from the surrounding urban fabric? The Chase tower, designed under the imperative of maximum organizational flexibility, was supported by 3-foot by 5-foot columns positioned on its east and west faces outside the bright white curtain wall, with two more rows of interior columns running through the core. This was done to allow for future shifts within the company, such as the expansion and moving of departments, as well as to provide for one-third of the floor space to be rented.66 Like many large corporations at that time, Chase Manhattan had also been dealing with the often unpredictable and substantial needs of the new office machines—including mainframe computers—and so sought interior flexibility t